The Relevance for Social Economics of Alisdair Maclntyre's Conception of a Practice

Abstract

I. Introduction Contemporary neoclassical economic thought has been characterised by an imperialist tendency to broaden field of economic modelling to encompass social practices conventionally thought to be outside traditional domain of economics. This presents social economics with challenge of formulating alternatives to an approach which seems invariably to draw from practitioners that it is reductionistic. This paper examines relevance for social economics of Alisdair MacIntyre's conception of a practice as it is presented in his acclaimed book After Virtue (MacIntyre, 1985). Section II outlines MacIntyrean notion of a practice. Section III then examines extent to which MacIntyrean scheme can buttress basic philosophical foundations of social economics. Section IV then examines relevance of this scheme to practices in crisis. Section V applies these arguments to a practice in which economists participate -- that of economic discourse. The main arguments of paper are then presented in Section VI by way of conclusion. II. The MacIntyrean Concept of a Practice In After Virtue Alisdair MacIntyre has vigorously criticized Enlightenment and its influence on contemporary ethics and has called for a return to Aristotelian tradition in moral philosophy. A key feature of latter tradition is a teleological scheme within which there is a fundamental contrast between man-as-he-happens-to-be and man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-essential-nature. MacIntyre argues that there is a basic structure to moral scheme which Aristotle analysed in Nicomachean Ethics which was not essentially changed when it was placed within a framework of theistic beliefs during Middle Ages: We have a threefold scheme in which human-nature-as-it-happens-to-be (human nature in its untutored state) is initially discrepant and discordant with precepts of ethics and needs to be transformed by instruction of practical reason and experience into human-nature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realised-its-telos. Each of three elements of scheme -- conception of untutored human nature, conception of precepts of rational ethics and conception of human-nature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realised-its-telos--requires reference to other two if its status and function are to be intelligible (1985, p. 53). MacIntyre then examines Kierkegaard, Kant, Diderot, Hume and Adam Smith as contributors to Enlightenment project of providing a rational justification for mortality in which all reject any teleological view of human nature, any view of men as having an essence which defines his true end (1985, p. 54). According to MacIntyre this project had to fail because it attempted to justify moral injunctions derived from Europe's ancient Greek and Christian heritage while at same time depriving them of teleological context within which they were intelligible. The consequences of this failure is that there is no rational way of securing moral agreement when rival arguments logically proceed from rival premises where each premise employs some quite different normative or evaluative concept from others (1985, p. 8). There is, therefore, widespread implicit acceptance of emotivism, described by MacIntyre as the doctrine that evaluative judgments and more specifically moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character (1985, pp. 11-12). The doctrine of emotivism provides a rationale for positivist, value-free focus of neoclassical economics and presents a challenge to social economics which according to Stikkers views normative issues as at least equally important for economics as empirical ones: economics is as much a branch of ethics as it is a social science (1987, p. …