Abstract
In this paper I summarize the main ideas of Alasdair MacIntyre on Natural Law. I begin with an overview of ethical and political ideas dealt with by MacIntyre. Then I define his position in the debate between current legal philosophers before moving on to his position on debate on Natural Law and highlighting some difficulties in his conception. However, I close by focusing on how many of MacIntyre’s ideas can shed light on solutions to current problems.
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Notes
- 1.
See Blackledge and Davidson (2008).
- 2.
See Perreau-Saussine (2005).
- 3.
- 4.
MacIntyre (1966, 199).
- 5.
Ibidem, 86. “Consider now how modern post-Kantian ethics emphasizes the contrast between duty and inclination. If what I do is made intelligible in terms of the pursuit of my desires, if my desires are cited as affording me reasons for doing what I do, it cannot be that in doing what I do I am doing my duty. Hence when I am doing my duty what I do cannot be exhibited as a human action, intelligible in the way that ordinary human actions are. So the pursuit of duty becomes a realm of its own, unconnected with anything else in human life”.
- 6.
MacIntyre (1976a, 180).
- 7.
MacIntyre (1972).
- 8.
MacIntyre (1971).
- 9.
MacIntyre (1967).
- 10.
MacIntyre (1976b).
- 11.
MacIntyre (1980, 32). “Thus it is precisely when the law is least needed, when it is least invoked, that it is in the best working order. When by contrast there is continuous resort to the law, it is generally a sign that moral relations have to some large degree broken down. It is a sign that the motives which make us invoke the law are those of fear and self-interest. And when fear and self-interest have to be brought into play, law itself tends to be morally discredited. This is what has happened in our own society. It has happened because the law has too often been made the instrument of partisan, self-interested purposes. The conversion of law to the service of such purposes perhaps started in the last century with the use of the courts by the large capitalists to aggrandize by transforming the law of property in an individualistic direction. But it was continued in the strategy of reformers and liberals who then tried to make the courts instruments for their purposes”.
- 12.
MacIntyre (1980, 32).
- 13.
MacIntyre (1981, 86).
- 14.
Aquinas, Quaestio Disp. De Veritate – q.1. c. 17 art. 4.
- 15.
- 16.
MacIntyre (1986, 364ss).
- 17.
MacIntyre (1990a, 76).
- 18.
- 19.
MacIntyre (1999).
- 20.
MacIntyre (2000).
- 21.
Hart (1955, 175).
- 22.
MacIntyre (1983).
- 23.
MacIntyre (2000, 97–98). “There is an important parallel between Hart’s argument concerning natural rights and Hart’s arguments for his particular conception of natural law. In both cases the only premises from which he believes we can argue soundly are such as to deny us any substantive moral content in our conclusions. Just as we are provided with no grounds for believing that there actually are any natural rights so the function of legal systems, according to Hart’s account of natural law, could be adequately discharged by fundamentally unjust legal systems. All that is requiredfor adequate discharge of function is that some human group should have met its needs for the preservation of life, for security, and for stability in the distribution of property by instituting a system of law. Such a group could allow its laws to sanction the persecution of minorities or the protection of slavery without those laws failing in any way to discharge their proper function for that particular group. So Hart’s theory of the natural function and core content of law does not provide a standard for evaluating legal systems except in terms of their effectiveness or ineffectiveness in certain limited ways”.
- 24.
MacIntyre (2000, 108–109).
- 25.
MacIntyre (1999, 10).
- 26.
Ibidem, 111, “The precepts of the natural law are those precepts promulgated by God through reason without conformity to which human beings cannot achieve their common good. The precepts of the natural law however include much more than rules. For among the precepts which enjoin us to do whatever the virtues require of us. We are enjoined to do whatever it is that courage or justice or temperatness demand on this or that occasion and always, in so acting, to act prudently. Notice that the level of practice we need no reason for some particular action over and above that it is in this situation what one or more of the virtues requires. The acts required by the virtues are each of them worth performing for their own sake”.
- 27.
Arnhart (1998, 258–266).
- 28.
MacIntyre (1999, 121–125).
- 29.
MacIntyre (2000, 108–109).
- 30.
MacIntyre (1992, 10).
- 31.
MacIntyre (2000, 102–106).
- 32.
MacIntyre (1981, 188–189).
- 33.
MacIntyre (2000, 113–114). “What these people will have deprived themselves of is the only account of natural law that not only is able to explain its own rejection, but also justifies plain persons in regarding themselves as already having within themselves the resources afforded by a knowledge of fundamental law, resources by means of which judge the claims to jurisdiction over them of any system of positive law. In the United States today, we inhabit a society in which a system of positive law with two salient characteristics has been developed. At a variety of points, it invades the lives of plain persons, and its tangled complexities are such that it often leaves those plain persons no alternative but to put themselves into the hand of lawyers”.
- 34.
See Perreau-Saussine (2005, 162).
- 35.
MacIntyre (1994a, 303). “The modern nation-state, in whatever guise, is a dangerous and unmanageable institution, presenting itself on the one hand as a bureaucratic supplier of goods and services, which is always about to, but never actually does, give its clients value for money, and on the other as a repository of sacred values, which from time to time invites one to lay down one’s life on its behalf. (…) It is like being asked to die for the telephone company”.
- 36.
MacIntyre (2009a, 89). See Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Iª-IIae q. 94 a. 4 co.
- 37.
MacIntyre (1996a, 41–63).
- 38.
MacIntyre (2009a, 108).
- 39.
MacIntyre (2006a, 51). “And we should note that in the long-standing and ongoing debates between utilitarians, Kantians, and contractarians no arguments have emerged that have convinced the most open-minded adherents of any of those contending parties of the rational superiority of the views of their opponents. Since what utilitarians, Kantians, and contractarians share by way of assumptions and presuppositions is much greater than what any of them share with Thomistic Aristotelians, it would be surprising if they were open to admitting the force of Thomistic Aristotelian arguments”.
- 40.
MacIntyre (2009a, 91). “They would have to be rules prohibiting the taking of innocent life and the use of violence against the property and liberty of others and enjoining truthfulness and candor in deliberation. They would have to include rules prohibiting one from making commitments to others that one does not expect to fulfill and that bind one to keep whatever promises one might have made. Since they are to be rules without which genuinely rational deliberation would be impossible, they would have to be rules that would inform one’s social relationships with anyone with whom one might at some time have to enter into shared deliberation, that is, with anyone whatsoever. But this set of precepts turns out to be identical with the precepts that Aquinas identifies as the precepts of natural law, so that as rational agents we are, just as Aquinas concluded, committed to conformity to the precepts of the natural law. But these are not the only commitments that we must make in order to engage in rational deliberation”.
- 41.
MacIntyre (2006b, 64–82).
- 42.
MacIntyre (2009a, 161).
- 43.
MacIntyre (2009a, 90). “Those who in their everyday practice presuppose one of these mistaken views of the human good will also and consequently misunderstand the precepts of natural law. That this is so and that therefore there are bound to be disagreements about what the precepts of the natural law are and how they are to be applied Aquinas was certainly aware. He recognized that there were cultures, such as that of the ancient Germans, whose moral code was in some respects at variance with natural law. But he did not know about and could not have known about the wide range of striking moral disagreements of which our modern knowledge of other cultures and their various histories has made us aware”.
- 44.
MacIntyre (2009a, 162).
- 45.
MacIntyre (2009b, 4–8).
- 46.
MacIntyre (1996b, 96).
- 47.
Lisska (1996, 2–5).
- 48.
MacIntyre (2009c, 315). “I am committed to holding that, if the requirements of practical reason are rightly understood, then practical rationality provides everything that is required for the moral life, independently of any theological ethics. Practical reason not only provides us with a good reason to act in accordance with the precepts of the natural law, but also guides us in how to apply it”.
- 49.
MacIntyre (2009a ch. 10).
- 50.
Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Iª-IIae q. 94 a. 6 co.
- 51.
MacIntyre (1994c, 179). “We cannot adequately characterize -adequately, that is, for practical life, let alone for theory- that good towards the achievement of which we are directed by our natures and by providence, except in terms which already presuppose the binding character of the exceptionless negative precepts of the natural law. And correspondingly we cannot characterize adequately that in our natures which alone makes us apt for and directed towards the achievement of that good except in the same terms. Unless our passions, habits, motives, intentions, and purposes are ordered by the negative as well as the positive precepts of the natural law, they will not be ordered towards our own good and the good of others. For the negative precepts structure or fail to structure our relationships with others as well as our characters”.
- 52.
Irwin (2007, ch. 2).
- 53.
MacIntyre (1994b, 47). “The Aristotelian case for the Aristotelian premises in moral and political philosophy is first that for those systematically engaged in the practices of rational local community their truth always must turn out in the end to be insecapable and secondly that in parallel fashion modern claims about utility and rights, in the context of such practice, cannot in the end be recognized as other than arbitrary. But everything then depends upon what is to be accounted rational local community”
- 54.
Maritain (1943, 20).
- 55.
Macintyre (1990b, 2).
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Ramis-Barceló, R. (2013). Alasdair MacIntyre on Natural Law. In: Contreras, F. (eds) The Threads of Natural Law. Ius Gentium: Comparative Perspectives on Law and Justice, vol 22. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5656-4_12
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