believes that he must proceed in this way. As in After Virtue,historicalinquiry
is the only tool available to him, and it is impossible to find an adjudication
procedure in any other way.
41
In emphasizing these aspects of the book, I am
giving a somewhat unorthodox reading of Whose Justice? The book is often
seen primarily as a historical chronicle – as a survey of several well-established
ways of thinking about practical rationality.
42
I, on the other hand, see the
book as a discussion of philosophical method, albeit a discussion that is
historically informed, and necessarily so. It is a search for a method, an
inquiry into how to choose among different ways of understanding practical
rationality. While it does trace the history of these different views of practical
rationality, it does so in order to make a larger philosophical point. In other
words, Whose Justice? is best seen as an attempt to do philosophy historically.
Furthermore, the book does philosophy historically in a way that continues
the critical project of After Virtue. After Virtue uses historical inquiry to
discredit the enlightenment project; Whose Justice? uses it to discover a way
of finding an alternative to this project.
The opening pages of Whose Justice? announce that the book is concerned
with practical reason. It asks “what makes it rational to act in one way rather
than another and what makes it rational to advance and defend one
conception of practical rationality rather than another” (WJ, ix). These
look like familiar metaethical questions: what does it mean to have a reason
to do something? What things do we have reasons to do? But according to
MacIntyre, these questions take on a new urgency in light of the moral
fragmentation of contemporary culture. As MacIntyre argues in After
Virtue, contemporary culture is torn by interminable debate over what
things are good, which actions are right, and what justice requires of us. If
we try to settle these debates by consulting some philosophical theory of
justice, we immediately encounter the same fragmentation at a higher level.
We find “conflicting conceptions of justice, conceptions which are strik-
ingly at odds with each other” (WJ, 1). And if we try to settle these debates
41
I have in mind here MacIntyre’s claim that we cannot adjudicate among traditions by means of the
argumentative strategies found within a tradition – say, the types of arguments used by contemporary
analytic philosophers. Such strategies may indeed be used to convince members of one tradition that
their tradition is superior to its competitors. But they cannot be used to adjudicate among traditions,
since other traditions might not accept the legitimacy of these strategies. Using these argumentative
strategies would therefore assume the superiority of the first tradition, not demonstrate it, and so beg
the question. See, for example, WJ, 166.
42
See, for example, Julia Annas, “MacIntyre on Traditions.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 18:4 (1989),
388–404; and Robert George, “Moral Particularism, Thomism, and Traditions.” Review of
Metaphysics 42 (1989), 593–605. For an exception to this trend, see J. B. Schneewind, “MacIntyre
and the Indispensability of Tradition.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 51:1 (1991), 165–168.
Search for a method: Whose Justice? Which Rationality? 99