Ethics

Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

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Alasdair MacIntyre

1988

Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) is MacIntyre's most systematic philosophical work and the direct sequel to After Virtue. It addresses the central challenge raised by the earlier book: if moral reasoning is always tradition-dependent, how can we evaluate or choose between competing traditions? Does this not collapse into relativism? MacIntyre's answer is sophisticated and counter-intuitive. He surveys four major traditions of justice and rationality — Aristotelian, Augustinian, Thomistic, and modern liberal — and argues that each constitutes a distinct and internally coherent way of reasoning about justice. Traditions are not sealed off from each other; they interact, conflict, and develop through encounters with rival traditions that force them to address anomalies and failures they could not resolve from within their own resources. The tradition that can resolve not only its own problems but also the unsolved problems of its rivals, while explaining why those rivals failed, is rationally superior. MacIntyre argues that Thomistic Aristotelianism has this advantage over its rivals — particularly over the liberal tradition, which is itself a tradition while pretending not to be. The book is a sustained argument that rationality is not a standpoint-neutral faculty but always the rationality of a specific tradition.