Political Reasoning and the Nation-State: A MacIntyrean Consideration of a Thomistic Debate

Abstract

AbstractThe Traditional Natural Law (TNL) considers the political community a good human beings desire as one of the greatest goods of practical life, while those within the New Natural Law (NNL) camp argue instead that the political community is an instrumental good. Neither side has been able to offer a decisive refutation of the other, despite each offering strong arguments supported by both philosophical argument and textual evidence. In response, I will present Alasdair MacIntyre’s approach to practical reason and political community in hopes of shedding new light on this debate. From a MacIntyrean perspective, the TNL and NNL disagreement is more apparent than real, because the two sides in fact address different objects. MacIntyre presents political community as a constitutive aspect of excellent practical reasoning, but he denies the modern nation-state can be such a community. Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Alasdair MacIntyre, “Theories of Natural Law in the Culture of Advanced Modernity,” in Common Truths: New Perspectives in Natural Law, ed. Edward B. McLean (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 200), 94. See also Alasdair MacIntyre, “Intractable Moral Disagreements,” in Intractable Disputes about the Natural Law: Alasdair MacIntyre and Critics, ed. Lawrence S. Cunningham (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 1–52.2 MacIntyre, “Theories of Natural Law,” 92.3 For the background of this debate, see Germain Grisez, “The First Principle of Practical Reason: A Commentary on the Summa Theologiae, 1–2, Question 94, Article 2,” in Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Anthony Kenny (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976), 340–382; Ralph McInerny, Aquinas on Human Action: A Theory of Practice (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1); Christopher Tollefsen, “The New Natural Law Theory,” Lyceum 10, (2008): 1–17; John Finnis, Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Steven Jensen, Knowing the Natural Law: From Precepts and Inclinations to Deriving Oughts (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2015); John Macias, “John Finnis and Alasdair MacIntyre on Our Knowledge of the Precepts of Natural Law,” Res Philosophica 93 (2016): 103–123; Ryan T. Anderson, editor, “Defense of the New Natural Law,” National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly (2019): 165–329.4 John Finnis, “Is Natural Law Theory Compatible with Limited Government?,” in Natural Law, Liberalism, and Morality, ed. Robert P. George (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 5.5 Finnis, Aquinas, 247.6 Ibid, 247–248.7 Michael Pakaluk, “Is the Common Good of Political Society Limited and Instrumental?” The Review of Metaphysics 55 (2001): 91.8 John Goyette, “On the Transcendence of the Political Common Good: Aquinas versus the New Natural Law Theory,” The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 13 (2013): 155.9 Goyette, 141; Pakaluk, “Common Good of Political Society,” 9310 Finnis, Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory, 235.11 Ibid, 235–237.12 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q.101, a.1 (Rome: Editiones Paulinae, 1962), 1512.13 Thomas Osborne, “MacIntyre, Thomism and the Contemporary Common Good,” Analyse & Kritik 30 (2008): 84.14 Daniel Mark, “New Natural Law Theory and the Common Good of the Political Community,” National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 19 (2019): 299. Mark, “New Natural Law Theory,” 299.15 Ibid.16 Finnis, Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory, 226–227.17 Alasdair MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 51. Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), 107.18 Alasdair MacIntyre, “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good,” in The MacIntyre Reader, ed. Kelvin Knight (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 240. For commentators on MacIntyre’s emphasis on practical reasoning, see Christopher Stephen Lutz, Reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2012) and “Alasdair MacIntyre’s Ethics of Practical Reasoning: Morality in Practice,” Politics & Poetics 4 (2018); Kelvin Knight, Aristotelian Philosophy: Ethics and Politics from Aristotle to MacIntyre (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007); Caleb Bernacchio and Kelvin Knight, “MacIntyre and Political Philosophy,” in Learning from MacIntyre, ed. Ron Beadle and Geoff Moore (Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2020), 117–139.19 Alasdair MacIntyre, “How Aristotelianism can become Revolutionary: Ethics, Resistance, and Utopia,” Virtue and Politics: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Revolutionary Aristotelianism, ed. Paul Blackledge and Kelvin Knight (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 1620 MacIntyre, “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good,” 241.21 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 187.22 Jeffrey L. Nicholas, “Who Stands for Un̳čí Makhá: The Liberal Nation-State, Racism, Freedom, and Nature,” in Liberty and the Ecological Crisis: Freedom on a Finite Planet, eds. Christhoper J. Orr, Kaitlin Kish, and Bruce Jennings (Oxfordshire, UK: Routledge, 2019), 114.23 MacIntyre “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good,” 248.24 MacIntyre, “Intractable Moral Disagreements,” 23.25 MacIntyre, “Theories of Natural Law in the Cultures of Adavnced Modernity,” 93. See also MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, 89; MacIntyre, “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good,” 247; MacIntyre, “Natural Law as Subversive,” 48.26 MacIntyre, “Natural Law as Subversive,” 49.27 MacIntyre, “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good,” 248.28 MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, 135–136.29 Ibid, 108.30 Gregory Froelich, “The Equivocal Status of Bonum Commune” The New Scholasticism 63 (1989): 38–57.31 MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, 108.32 Ibid, 123.33 MacIntyre, “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good,” 242.34 Alasdair MacIntyre, “Poetry as Political Philosophy: Notes on Burke and Yeats,” in Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 206), 163. See also Alasdair MacIntyre, “A Partial Response to my Critics,” in After MacIntyre: Critical Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, ed. John Horton and Susan Mendus (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 303.35 Alasdair MacIntyre, “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas, 1984), 13.36 Ibid, 11.37 MacIntyre, “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good,” 236. For commentators on MacIntyre’s critique of the nation-state, see Mark C. Murphy, “MacIntyre’s Political Philosophy,” in Alasdair MacIntyre, ed. Mark C. Murphy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 152–175; Peter McMylor, “Compartmentalization and Social Roles: MacIntyre’s Critical Theory of Modernity,” in Virtue and Politics: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Revolutionary Aristotelianism, ed. Paul Blackledge and Kelvin Knight (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 228–240; Ronald Beiner, “Community versus Citizenship: MacIntyre’s Revolt against the Modern State,” Critical Review 14 (2000): 459–479; Keith Breen, “The State, Compartmentalization and the Turn to Local Community: A Critique of the Political Thought of Alasdair MacIntyre,” The European Legacy 10 (2005): 485–501.38 Caleb Bernacchio and Kelvin Knight, “MacIntyre and Political Philosophy,” in Learning from MacIntyre, ed. Ron Beadle and Geoff Moore (Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2020), 119.39 Alasdair MacIntyre, “Three Perspectives on Marxism: 1953, 1968, 1995,” in Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 154.40 Ibid.41 MacIntyre, “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good,” 242.42 Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Idea of America” London Review of Books 6 (1980): 14. See also MacIntyre’s “The American Idea,” in America and Ireland, 1776–1976: The American Identity and the Irish Connection, ed. David Noel Doyle and Owen Dudley Edwards (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1980), 57–68.43 Alasdair MacIntyre, “Power and Virtue in the American Republic,” in The Case For and Against Power for the Federal Government (Ripon, Wisconsin: Ripon College Press, 1976), 18.44 Jeffery L. Nicholas, “The Common Good, Rights, and Catholic Social Thought: Prolegomena to Any Future Account of Common Goods,” Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics 5 (2015): 14.45 MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, 132.46 MacIntyre, “Intractable Moral Disagreements,” 20.47 Alasdair MacIntyre, “Social Structures and their Threats to Moral Agency,” in Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 197. See also MacIntyre, “How Aristotelianism can become Revolutionary,” 12; Alasdair MacIntyre’s, “Some Enlightenment Projects Reconsidered,” in Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 172–185.48 MacIntyre, “How Aristotelianism can become Revolutionary,” 12.49 MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, 141.50 St. Thomas, ST, I-II, q.90, a.2 and q.92, a.1.51 Sean Sayers, “MacIntyre and Modernity,” in Virtue and Politics: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Revolutionary Aristotelianism ed. Paul Blackledge and Kelvin Knight (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 83–84; Timothy Chappell, “Utopias and the Art of the Possible,” Analyse & Kritik 30 (2008): 186–187; Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 21–22; Jason W. Blakely, “Does Liberalism Lack Virtue? A Critique of Alasdair MacIntyre’s Reactionary Politics,” Interpretation 44 (2017): 10.52 Aristotle, Politics, III, c.6, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 2, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2029–2030; St. Thomas Aquinas, Sententia Libri Politicorum, III, c.6 (Rome: Leonine, 1971), 204.53 William T. Cavanaugh, “Killing for the Telephone Company: Why the Nation-State is not the Keeper of the Common Good,” Modern Theology 20 (2004): 246–250.54 V. Bradley Lewis, “The Common Good against the Modern State? On MacIntyre’s Political Philosophy,” Josephinum Journal of Theology 16 (2009): 367.55 See Thomas S. Hibbs, “MacIntyre, Aquinas, and Politics,” The Review of Politics 66 (2004): 357–383, Osborne, “Contemporary Common Good,” 84–88, and Lewis, “Modern State,” 374–375.56 Osborne, “Contemporary Common Good,” 87.57 Lewis, “Modern State,” 374. See also Nathan J. Pinkoski, “Manent and Perreau-Saussine on MacIntyre’s Aristotelianism,” Perspectives on Political Science 48 (2019): 1–11.58 Osborne, “Contemporary Common Good,” 87; Hibbs, “MacIntyre, Aquinas, and Politics,” 372–374.59 Lewis, “Modern State,” 367.60 See Herbert C. Kelman, “Nationalism, Patriotism, and National Identity: Social-Psychological Dimensions,” in Patriotism in the Lives of Individuals and Nations, ed. David Bar-Tal and Ervin Staub (Chicago: Nelson-Hall Publishers, 1997), 165–189; Robert M. Kunovich, “The Sources and Consequences of National Identification,” American Sociological Review 74 (2009): 573–593; Tim Edensor, National Identity, Popular Culture and Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2002).61 Jacques Maritain, Man and the State (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1998), 3–4.62 MacIntyre, “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good,” 241.63 Cf. MacIntyre, “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good,” 236–237, and Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, 126–127.64 MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, 296–297.65 Ibid, 176–183.66 Yves R. Simon, A General Theory of Authority (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980), 157–158.67 St. Thomas, ST, I-II, 96, a.4.68 MacIntyre, “Natural Law as Subversive,” 49.69 Bernacchio and Knight, “MacIntyre and Political Philosophy,” 129.70 MacIntyre, “Three Perspectives on Marxism,” 146.71 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 263.72 Alasdair MacIntyre (2017, April 25). Keynote: Common Goods, Frequent Evils, YouTube, accessed February 2, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nx0Kvb5U04.73 Knight, A Revolutionary Aristotelianism, 187.74 MacIntyre, “How Aristotelianism can be Revolutionary,” 19.75 Osborne, “Contemporary Common Good,” 89.76 Ibid.77 For more on this new approach, see Lutz, Tradition in the Ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre, 141–155, and Macias, “John Finnis and Alasdair MacIntyre.”78 Mark, “New Natural Law Theory and the Common Good,” 299.79 MacIntyre, “Natural Law Reconsidered,” 98.80 Ibid, 99.81 MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, 125.82 Alasdair MacIntyre, “Toleration and the Goods of Conflict,” in Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 211.83 Goyette, “On the Transcendence of the Political Common Good,” 141.84 Mark, “New Natural Law and the Political Common Good,” 301.85 Goyette, “On the Transcendence of the Political Common Good,” 155.86 See MacIntyre, “Social Structures and their Threats to Moral Agency.”87 Cavanaugh, “Killing for the Telephone Company,” 267.88 For MacIntyre’s account of revolutionary Aristotelianism, see MacIntyre, “How Aristotelianism can be Revolutionary,” and Kelvin Knight, “Revolutionary Aristotelianism,” in Virtue and Politics: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Revolutionary Aristotelianism, ed. Paul Blackledge and Kelvin Knight (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 2011), 20–34. For criticisms of MacIntyre’s view, see Keith Breen, “Alasdair MacIntyre and the Hope for a Politics of Virtuous Acknowledge Dependence,” Contemporary Political Theory 1 (2002): 181–201, and Tony Burns, “Revolutionary Aristotelianism? The Political Thought of Aristotle, Marx, and MacIntyre,” in Virtues and Politics: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Revolutionary Aristotelianism,” ed. Paul Blackledge and Kelvin Knight (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 35–53.89 Bernacchio and Knight, “MacIntyre and Political Philosophy,” 137.90 See MacIntyre, “How Aristotelianism can become Revolutionary,” 17, and Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, 176–183.91 Cavanaugh, “Killing for the Telephone Company,” 267.92 Charles Taylor, Patrizia Nanz, Madeleine Beaubien Taylor, Reconstructing Democracy: How Citizens Are Building from the Ground Up (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020).93 See Christopher Tollefsen, “The New Natural Law Theory,” Lyceum 10 (2008): 2–3.94 See Jacques Maritain, Scholasticism & Politics, trans. Mortimer Adler (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2011); Yves Simon, Philosophy of Democratic Government (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993).