“[W]hat many of us are educated into is, not a coherent way of thinking and judging, but one constructed out of an amalgam of social and cultural fragments inherited both from different traditions from which our culture was originally derived (Puritan, Catholic, Jewish) and from different stages in and aspects of the development of modernity (the French Enlightenment, the Scottish Enlightenment, nineteenth-century economic liberalism, twentieth-century political liberalism). . . .

“To know what justice is, so it may seem, we must first learn what rationality in practice requires of us. Yet someone who tries to learn this at once encounters the fact that disputes about the nature of rationality in general and about practical rationality in particular are apparently as manifold and as intractable as disputes about justice. . . .

“One of the most striking facts about modern political orders is that they lack institutionalized forums within which these fundamental disagreements can be systematically explored and charted, let alone there being any attempt made to resolve them. The facts of disagreement themselves frequently go unacknowledged, disguised by a rhetoric of consensus. . . .

“To the readership of the New York Times, or at least to that part of it which shares the presuppositions of those who write that parish magazine of affluent and self-congratulatory liberal enlightenment, the congregations of evangelical fundamentalism appear unfashionably unenlightened. But to the members of those congregations that readership appears to be just as much a community of prerational faith as they themselves are but one whose members, unlike themselves, fail to recognize themselves for what they are, and hence are in no position to level charges of irrationality at them or anyone else. . . .

“It was a central aspiration of the Enlightenment, an aspiration the formulation of which was itself a great achievement, to provide for debate in the public realm standards and methods of rational justification by which alternative courses of action in every sphere of life could be adjudged just or unjust, rational or irrational, enlightened or unenlightened. So, it was hoped, reason would displace authority and tradition. Rational justification was to appeal to principles undeniable by any rational person and therefore independent of all those social and cultural particularities which the Enlightenment thinkers took to be the mere accidental clothing of reason in particular times and places. . . .

“Yet both the thinkers of the Enlightenment and their successors proved unable to agree as to what precisely those principles were which would be found undeniable by all rational persons. . . . Consequently, the legacy of the Enlightenment has been the provision of an ideal of rational justification which it has proved impossible to attain. And hence in key part derives the inability within our culture to unite conviction and rational justification. . . .

“Is there some mode of understanding which could find no place in the Enlightenment’s vision of the world by means of which the conceptional and theoretical resources can be provided for reuniting conviction concerning such matters as justice on the one hand and rational enquiry and justification on the other? . . . Any attempt to provide a radically different alternative standpoint is bound to be found rationally unsatisfactory in a variety of ways from the standpoint of the Enlightenment itself. Hence it is inevitable that such an attempt should be unacceptable to and rejected by those whose allegiance is to the dominant intellectual and cultural modes of the present order. . . .

“Of what did the Enlightenment deprive us? What the Enlightenment made us for the most part blind to and what we now need to recover is, so I shall argue, a conception of rational enquiry as embodied in a tradition, a conception according to which the standards of rational justification themselves emerge from and are part of a history in which they are vindicated by the way in which they transcend the limitations of and provide remedies for the defects of their predecessors within the history of that same tradition.”

MacIntyre points out that under the rules of the Enlightenment’s understanding of reason, it is assumed that rival doctrines that contend with one another concerning the requirements of justice are easily detached from the history of their formation and sustaining. “By contrast from the standpoint of tradition-constituted and tradition-constitutive inquiry, what a particular doctrine claims is always a matter of how precisely it was in fact advanced, of the linguistic particularities of its formulation, of what in that time and place had to be denied, if it was to be asserted, of what was at that time and place presupposed by its assertion, and so on. Doctrines, theses, and arguments all have to be understood in terms of historical context. It does not, of course, follow that the same doctrine or the same arguments may not reappear in different contexts. Nor does it follow that claims to timeless truth are not being made. It is rather that such claims are being made for doctrines whose formulation is itself time-bound and that the concept of timelessness is itself a concept with a history, one which in certain types of context is not at all the same concept that it is in others.

“So rationality itself, whether theoretical or practical, is a concept with a history. . . .

“What a tradition of enquiry has to say, both to those within and to those outside it, cannot be disclosed in any other way [than narrative]. To be an adherent of a tradition is always to enact some further stage in the development of one’s tradition; to understand another tradition is to attempt to supply, in the best terms imaginatively and conceptually available to one — and later we shall see what problems can arise over this — the kind of account which an adherent would give.”

—from Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Duckworth, 1988)

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