The Emotivist Self

Emotivism, as MacIntyre diagnoses it, is not merely a philosophical theory about the meaning of moral terms (though it is that too, in the work of Ayer and Stevenson). It is a sociological fact about the way moral discourse actually functions in modern liberal societies. When people say "that is just" or "that is wrong", they are — despite their own self-understanding — doing nothing more than expressing their attitudes and attempting to influence others to share them. The interminable quality of modern moral debates — on abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, distributive justice — is not accidental but follows necessarily from the emotivist character of the moral vocabulary in use: there is no shared rational framework that could in principle resolve them.

The emotivist self is what MacIntyre calls the "unencumbered self" — a self prior to and independent of all social roles, traditions, and community attachments. This self chooses its values as it chooses its lifestyle: from among a menu of options, none of which has any prior claim on it. MacIntyre argues that this conception of the self, which Kant and the liberal tradition valorise as the expression of autonomy, is in fact a philosophical fantasy — and a harmful one. No actual human being comes to selfhood in this way; the self is constituted by its social roles, its community, its narrative history, and its inherited traditions. The unencumbered self is not free — it is empty.

The emotivist self generates a characteristic distinction between two types of social relationship: those in which I treat another person as a means to my ends (manipulative relations) and those in which I treat them as an end in themselves (non-manipulative relations). MacIntyre argues that the emotivist self, having no rational basis for its moral commitments, can in principle only sustain manipulative relations — relations in which the appeal to shared values or reasons is always in fact an appeal to shared attitudes, and in which "persuasion" shades imperceptibly into manipulation. The emotivist culture is therefore one in which the boundary between legitimate influence and manipulation is permanently blurred.

The diagnosis of emotivism as the dominant moral culture of modernity is developed in chapters 2–3 of After Virtue. MacIntyre's analysis draws on G.E.M. Anscombe's seminal essay "Modern Moral Philosophy" (1958), which first identified the incoherence of the post-Enlightenment moral vocabulary.