MacIntyre's key invocation of narrative occurs in the chapter of After Virtue titled
“The Virtues, the Unity of a Human Life, and the Concept of a Tradition” (204-225). He makes two central arguments. The first is largely epistemological—it asks how we understand human action, how to correctly characterize behavior. The second is more ontological—it asks what unifies our lives, what our lives are such that they can have a telos, without which he thinks there is no hope of a coherent approach to morality. In both arguments, narrative plays the key role. My aim is to present them, and to cast doubt on the emphasis on unity, and thus to begin to disentangle narrative from unity.
In the first, epistemological argument, MacIntyre's target is the notion of “a basic action.” Such a notion is at the core of any analysis of action that starts with atomistic behavior, objectively described, and builds up to the sort of complicated actions that we recognize as meaningful and human. If the social sciences are to be modeled after the natural sciences, in which particular, objectively described instances are brought together to form predictive and law-like generalizations, such a foundationalist approach centered on basic actions would form its basis (AV, 79-108).20 MacIntyre thinks that extending such a scheme beyond the natural sciences is hopeless, arguing that an analysis of human action can't be built up atomistically. “That particular actions derive their character as parts of larger wholes,” he writes, “is a point of view alien to our dominant ways of thinking and yet one which it is necessary at least to consider if we are to begin to
20 MacIntyre's version of the relation between the natural and human sciences, and something like the distinction between explanation and understanding developed by Dilthey and revised by Gadamer and Ricoeur, is found in these chapters. I'll come to this distinction in chapter four.
understand how a life may be more than a sequence of individual actions and episodes”
(AV, 204). One can see already the general form of his argument, and also how it will relate to his ontological conclusions: actions must be understood as part of a life as a whole, and lives are whole.
MacIntyre offers a particular example. We look out the kitchen window and see a man doing something—how do we describe his behavior? If we are to generalize
correctly from such data points, we had better get them right. Yet, “It is a conceptual commonplace,” MacIntyre notes, “that one and the same segment of human behavior may be correctly characterized in a number of different ways” (AV, 206).21 Descriptions as various as “digging,” “gardening,” “exercising,” and “preparing for winter” all offer themselves up as appropriate. At the time, MacIntyre's chief opponent was the kind of hardcore behaviorist who wanted to make no appeal whatsoever to the internal states, the beliefs and intentions, of an agent. MacIntyre insists that it is only by way of an appeal to beliefs and intentions that we can decide which of these various descriptions is accurate, as there is nothing in the behavior—the brute physical movements themselves—which would allow us to distinguish between gardening and exercising, for example. “There is no such thing as 'behavior', to be identified prior to and independently of intentions, beliefs and settings,” he writes.
Suppose MacIntyre is right that, seeing a few seconds of behavior, we have no way of settling on the right description. Do we have to make the categorical jump of appealing to internal states to do so? Our man outside the kitchen window is moving dirt around with a shovel. If we simply wait a few moments to see if he drops some seeds, we'll already be quite a bit further along in deciding on the right description. That the behaviorist refuses to speculate about internal states doesn't entail that he or she can't amass a larger data set. MacIntyre's first response here will be that, if we have to wait
21 Until noted, all quotations come from this and the following few pages.
and see if seeds are planted in order to decide whether to describe the initial behavior as gardening or mere digging, then the notion of a “basic action” has already been lost. If one can't identify discrete behaviors on their own basis, then one is already appealing to larger and more intelligible wholes, which is exactly what he insists we must do.
The behaviorist thus needs to maintain that the descriptions with which MacIntyre begins—“digging” and “gardening,” “taking exercise” and “preparing for winter” even more so—are the wrong kinds of descriptions, ones that already range into interpretation.
Descriptions like “moving his arms,” “grasping a shovel,” and “displacing dirt” would presumably be better, though quite long descriptions, probably bearing little resemblance to our ordinary ways of speaking, would become necessary. All the better for the
behaviorist, perhaps, if our ordinary ways of describing human action are ridden through with folk psychology. MacIntyre's response here is that, in trying to buttress the position against objections, behaviorism loses sight of its original goal: explaining human action.
“Hence the project of a science of behavior takes on a mysterious and somewhat outré character,” he writes. “It is not that such a science is impossible; but there is nothing for it to be but a science of uninterpreted physical movement such as B. F. Skinner aspires to.” Even if we could settle on a list of behavioral descriptions that don't sneak in interpretation, even if we were to collect reams of data on arm movements, knee bends, shovel graspings, the uttering of certain phrases, and even if these yielded patterns of prediction about subsequent behavior (all dubious hypotheticals), it is MacIntyre's point that we wouldn't yet have explained anything about human action. We would still have to interpret these data sets. Any attempt to describe higher order, distinctively human
behavior (rather than something like merely moving dirt around) in such an objective manner seems all the more hopeless: “what would be utterly doomed to failure would be the project of a science of, say, political behavior, detached from a study of intentions, beliefs and settings.”
Here again the behaviorist might insist that the position has been misunderstood.
Speaking is after all one type of behavior, so we needn't resort to speculation about an agent's internal states to access information about intentions and beliefs. We can rely on self-reports, what someone says with respect to his or her intentions and beliefs. We needn't even assume that verbal behavior accurately represents internal states—we needn't appeal to internal states as having any reality at all. Verbal behavior is another kind of data to be collected, and another kind of action to be predicted. In fact,
MacIntyre thinks we have to call on an even wider context in order to decide which description is accurate—and at this point we can probably push beyond these familiar arguments to the content which is said to provide human action with its narrative form.
There are few card-carrying behaviorists anymore and, presumably, few
philosophers would object to appealing to an agent's internal states in order to decide how to correctly describe his or her behavior. The crucial stage of MacIntyre's argument is not that we need to appeal to intentions, but rather his subsequent claim that beliefs and intentions unify into a hierarchy—a structure he claims is basically narrative in character (when that hierarchy is less than fully coherent, it will resemble a less than fully coherent story, it would seem). Returning to the example, MacIntyre thinks even knowledge of the agent's intentions in the moment is insufficient to settle the question of how to accurately describe—and thus begin to understand—his behavior. Consider two competing
explanations: that he is gardening in order to get some exercise or that he is gardening to supplement his grocery shopping. If he intends both, we don't yet know which intention is primary, “of which it is the case that, had the agent intended otherwise, he would not have performed that action.” If he didn't care about exercise, would he still toil in the garden for the vegetables? If he didn't need the vegetables, would he still garden just to get outside? MacIntyre argues that to understand this action, we need “to know both what certain of his beliefs are and which of them are causally effective; […] we need to
know whether certain contrary-to-fact hypothetical statements are true or false.”
MacIntyre argues that the relevant intentions telescope outward: shorter-term intentions are made intelligible against longer-term intentions, and longer- against longest-term intentions: “Hence the behavior is only characterized adequately when we know what the longer and longest-term intentions invoked are and how the shorter-term intentions are related to the longer.” And so, he concludes, “we are involved in writing a narrative history.”22 If pressed, I don't think MacIntyre would quibble with the idea that it would be at least possible to itemize a person's intentions discursively in a form other than narrative. Probably it would even be possible to explicate the relational structure of the resulting corpus in non-narrative form, describing how some intentions are nested inside of other ones, or depend on one another for the agent's continued adherence. He would suggest, however, that to do so would be to abstract from the way we normally encounter beliefs and intentions—through narrative. As Taylor puts it, there is “a premiss buried deep in the naturalist way of thinking, viz., that the terms of everyday life, those in which we go about living our lives, are to be relegated to the realm of mere appearance”
(SS, 57). Behaviorism isn't just changing the terms, it's “changing the subject,” he writes, invoking Donald Davidson (SS, 58). Taylor's form of the argument is relevant here, as it isn't posed against a hardcore behaviorist.23 One might think that MacIntyre, writing in 1981, relies on a strawman in arguing against a simplistic form of behaviorism, a view already on the wane by that time. Taylor's rhetorical opponent is instead a more
sophisticated naturalist who thinks we can do without appeals to what Taylor calls “good-determined frameworks.”
In his 1977 essay “What Is Human Agency?,”24 Taylor discusses Harry Frankfurt's
22 MacIntyre makes a simultaneous appeal to “settings” to move from discrete behaviors to narrative history. To locate the gardner's behavior in either a marriage or in the life of a farm, for example, is to call on the histories of these institutions as both particular instances and general forms. This appeal to narrative is less relevant to my purposes, so I pass over the particulars of the argument.
23 For an even more recent, summary form of the argument, see Hutto in NUP, 43f.
24 Reprinted in 1985, vol. 1, 15-44.
distinction between first- and second-order desires. My desire for a rare sirloin steak, for example, is a first-order desire. But I know that eating the steak would be bad for my health, so I desire not to desire the steak. That is a second-order desire, which has the form of evaluating (in this case negatively) a first-order desire. If that evaluation is strong enough, it will create another first-order desire, the desire not to eat the steak, perhaps even one stronger than the original first-order desire, such that I don't eat the steak. Taylor agrees with Frankfurt that “what is distinctively human is the power to evaluate our desires,” but he thinks Frankfurt's notion of second-order desires doesn't yet capture how this works (1985, vol. 1, 15-16). Taylor makes another distinction, between weak and strong evaluation, the latter involving qualitative judgments of worth. It is only in these, Taylor thinks, that the form of desire becomes fully human.
Logically, there's no reason why one can't iterate desires to ever higher levels of order. Fairly quickly, though, it's hard to get a psychological grasp on what they mean.
My desire to not desire steak is a second-order desire, but already here we usually offer some gloss to explain why I have it, and how it feels to possess it: I also want to be healthy, and I know that eating steak will frustrate that desire. The desire to desire to not desire steak is a third-order desire, but here it seems we must offer some further gloss to understand what this means and to distinguish it from a (mere) second-order desire. At this third level, the gloss that would seem to make sense is this: I want to be the sort of person who is committed to my health (and thus desires to not desire steak). Actually, though, such a gloss is problematic. Frankfurt's scheme reduces desires to one logical type. More complicated desires are formed simply by substituting another desire into the place of the object. Especially for the naturalist, this is appealing, because it suggests only that we, unlike other animals, have processing power sufficient to compute such multiple-level moves. There's nothing spooky or discontinuous with lower animals that we need to explain. Taylor doesn't quite make this point, but glossing a third-order desire
as “I desire to be the sort of person that...” sneaks in a new kind of evaluative content, and of exactly the kind he thinks makes us human. My desire not to desire steak, if it springs from the fact that I want to be healthy, is still a means-based calculation. My desire not to desire steak, if it springs from the fact that I want to be the sort of person who cares about health, is different. Only here do we really find what Frankfurt calls
“reflective self-evaluation.” Health has been raised to the status of an ethical ideal that finds purchase in a self-image. This is all the more clear if my reason for desiring not to desire the steak is, say, a moral commitment to vegetarianism. This is an instance of strong evaluation: in some instances of comparison, the options “are judged as belonging to qualitatively different modes of life,” Taylor writes (1985, vol. 1, 16). Making a moral comparison between vegetarianism and meat-eating, or a lifestyle decision between pursuing healthy or unhealthy eating habits, are instances of such comparisons. For Taylor, it is only with this sort of evaluation that we become distinctively human.
Consider now how one goes about trying to change someone's desires. First-order desires are for the most part brute givens, physical desires that are not directly negotiable.
You find, on the basis of certain movements of saliva, that you desire steak. The way to override this desire is to appeal to a second-order desire: but don't you think eating meat is unhealthy? This remains a merely means-based thinking. Just one more step up, however, an appeal to your self-image might change your second-order desires: don't you want to be the sort of person who is committed to vegetarianism? Wouldn't that be consistent with other commitments you have? Non-coincidently, such a process looks like incipient storytelling: a coherent self-image is akin to a well-drawn character.
In Sources of the Self, Taylor develops this argument further in the notion of
“good-determined frameworks.” The background ideals which we use to make strong evaluations (rather than mere means-based judgments) form frameworks. These articulate a proto-ontology of what has worth, and what one needs to value in order to
find meaning and to be a person. The naturalist, by Taylor's account, instead seeks “to declare this issue of meaning a pseudo-question and brand the various frameworks within which it finds an answer as gratuitous inventions” (SS, 19). Taylor struggles to see how anyone could really inhabit such a view. “What are the requirements of making sense of our lives?,” he asks:
These requirements are not yet met if we have some theoretical language that purports to explain behaviour from the observer's standpoint [….] Suppose I can convince myself that I can explain people's behaviour as an observer without using a term like 'dignity'. What does this prove if I can't do without it as a term in my deliberations about what to do, how to behave, how to treat people, my questions about whom I admire, with whom I feel affinity, and the like? (SS, 57)25
Our current “best account” of how to understand ourselves isn't made from an observer's position, divorced from our professed values, and Taylor can't see how any such
naturalistic account could ever trump our ordinary self-understanding (SS, 58).
Narrative enters Taylor's account because of the way we exist in time: “our condition can never be exhausted for us by what we are, because we are always also changing and becoming” (SS, 47). Our ideal of the good shapes our decisions as we progress through time: “Since we cannot do without an orientation to the good, and since we cannot be indifferent to our place relative to this good, and this place is something that must always change and become, the issue of the direction of our lives must arise for us”
(SS, 47). We are similarly oriented toward our pasts: “I don't have a sense of where/what I am […] without some understanding of how I have got there or became so” (SS, 50).
Like MacIntyre, Taylor avoids the formal question of what makes something a narrative, but he invokes this term in reference to the shape our understanding takes as we
remember our pasts and project our futures: “My self-understanding necessarily has temporal depth and incorporates narrative”; “we understand ourselves inescapably in narrative” (SS, 50, 51).
Taylor introduces a further iteration of evaluation in the notion of a “hyper-good”:
25 Taylor makes a similar argument for why the subjective perspective can't be eradicated in his “Self-Interpreting Animals” (1985, vol. 1, 45-76).
“Most of us not only live with many goods but find that we have to rank them, and in some cases, this ranking makes one of them of supreme importance relative to the others.
[…] It is orientation to this which comes closest to defining my identity, and therefore my direction to this good is of unique importance to me” (SS, 62, 63). Recalling MacIntyre's structure of intentions, we can imagine a schematic of our criteria of evaluation, lesser goods nested within a pyramid capped by one ultimate good. Taylor stops short of concluding that all of us have one highest ideal, but “Even those of us who are not committed to so single-minded a way recognize higher goods” (SS, 63). His main point is that we don't merely weigh the strength of competing desires. We evaluate some kinds of goods as qualitatively more valuable—and our tendency is select one, or at most a few, goods as highest and thus defining of our identities.
It is in the final step of invoking the longest-term intention, a person's overarching concept of the good, that MacIntyre makes the move from his epistemological argument
—How do we understand human action?—to his ontological one—What makes me the
—How do we understand human action?—to his ontological one—What makes me the