Thomism Moral Theology After Macintyre: Modern Ethics, Tragedy and

Studies in Christian Ethics
http://sce.sagepub.com Moral Theology After Macintyre: Modern Ethics, Tragedy and Thomism
Fergus Kerr Studies in Christian Ethics 1995; 8; 33 DOI: 10.1177/095394689500800104 The online version of this article can be found at: http://sce.sagepub.com
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MORAL THEOLOGY AFTER MACINTYRE: MODERN ETHICS, TRAGEDY AND THOMISM Fergus Kerr
himself as a moral philosopher working in the Thomistic Aristotelian tradition (see most recently his substantial and very positive assessment of the papal encyclical Veritatis Splendor in The Thomist 58 (1994), 171-195). John Milbank, in Theology and Social Theory (1990), offers the first major study of how Maclntyres version of virtue ethics would need to be supplemented or (rather) radicalized to make it Christian. He cites exclusively from Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), in the preface to which Maclntyre withdraws the objections which he made in After Virtue (1981, second edition 1985) to the central Thomist thesis about the unity of the virtues and ultimate compatibility of all moral goods and goals. There is reason to believe that his next book will be even more sympathetic to Thomist ethics. But the change of mind over the question of the nature of conflicting goods and goals remains well worth attention if for no other reason than that it challenges all students of Christian ethics to reflect on how far their favourite moral theory, whatever it may be, can or should accommodate tragic dilemmas. MacIntyres MA dissertation at Manchester in 1951 attacked intuitionist and emotivist ethics. The first nine chapters of After Virtue extend that attack into vehement rejection of all modern moral
-
irmly denying that he is any kind of theologian, Alasdair Maclntyre
identifiers
utilitarian and Nietzschean. While there has been resistance within moral philosophy itself to details in Maclntyres account (by Peter Winch, Onora ONeill, Annette Baier among others), this indictment of the moral wilderness of our culture has been widely endorsed, particularly by students of Christian ethics. Other grand views of the scene are of course available. Charles Taylor for one, who is also a Catholic though not prepared to ally himself with Thomism, offers a much richer and far more positive account of the formation of the modern self in his Sources of the Self
philosophy, Humean, Kantian,
33
(1989). The recent return in Anglo-American philosophy to Aristotles ethics, breaking the grip of the traditional choice between deontology and utilitarianism, owes most to fine work by classicists (such as Sarah Broadie, Terence Irwin, Martha Craven Nussbaum and many others).
But, with After Virtue, Maclntyre certainly helped to place virtue ethics on the agenda as the serious alternative to the varieties of moral philosophy that have flourished since Hume and Kant. The modernity of all modem moral philosophies is defined, according to MacIntyres story, by the emergence since the Reformation and the Enlightenment of the liberal individual, conceived of as abstracted from the particularities of character, history and circumstance. The only way out of the illusions of this liberal individualism is said to be by rehabilitating something like the Aristotelian ethics denounced in their day by such luminaries of modernity as Luther and Hobbes (A V 154/165).
Kantianism and Virtue Ethics
Some influential moral philosophers are attracted by ancient virtue ethics precisely because it seems incompatible with Christian ethics. Explored most openly in John Caseys fine book Pagan Virtue (1990), this assumption pervades the writings of such philosophers as Nussbaum and Bernard Williams. For them, Christian ethics is equated with Kantianism. Virtue ethics, according to this story, would have been driven off the agenda by Christian ethics. For Christians, so this story goes, moral goodness cannot depend in any way upon the accidents of an individuals history. For Aristotle, on the other hand, the existence and possession of virtue includes just such an element of contingency. Not everyone is bom with the potential of becoming (say) brave or chaste. Human beings are animals, some of whom are always going to be stronger, better able to bear pain, less inclined to be fearful of the unknown, more easily angered or sexually aroused than others. Furthermore, we are social beings, which means that contingencies of birth, race, caste, gender, intelligence, culture, and so on, cannot be irrelevant in our growth in virtue. Christians, on the other hand, find no incompatibility between being good and being (say) stupid, uncultured, lacking in leisure, and suchlike. Indeed, for post-Nietzschean moralists like Nussbaum and Williams, self-stultification in the form of meekness, humility and so on, seems to lie close to the centre of Christian ethics. For Kant, the good man need not have any intelligence, let alone culture or property. Moral development and excellence owe nothing to such contingencies. A stupid man is as capable of being good as a clever one, since to have a good will does not depend upon special gifts or skills, as Casey says
34
(p. 145). The moral is entirely sealed off from the empirical. Indeed, for Kant, practical reason prudence is not a virtue. On the to a call judgment prudential is effectively to say that it is contrary, not moral at all which shows how Kantian our ordinary moral language in fact is. The social and political implications of this difference need no unravelling here. According to this story, the Kantian moralist will be inclined to think that delinquency has little or nothing to do with material conditions. An Aristotelian, on the other hand, would regard ethics, politics, economics, and so on, as inextricably connected. (Nussbaum and Williams certainly think their Aristotelianism has political implications; Onora ONeill, however, would advise us to read more Kant than the usual texts before we accept that his moral philosophy has no political bearing.)
-
Practical Reason and the Marquis
of Montrose
What Aristotles conception of the virtue of practical reason amounts to, so Maclntyre says, is an adequate sense of the traditions to which one belongs -a grasp of those future possibilities which the past has made available in the present -the kind of capacity for judgment which the agent possesses in knowing how to select among the relevant stack of maxims and how to apply them in particular situations (AV 207-8/223). This is Aristotles key virtue of practical reason
(phronesis), Aquinass prudentia. Cardinal Pole possessed this key virtue, Mary Tudor did not; the Marquis of Montrose possessed it, King Charles I did not: What Cardinal Pole and the Marquis of Montrose possessed were in fact
those virtues which enable their possessors to pursue both their own good and the good of the tradition of which they are the bearers even in situations defined by the necessity of tragic, dilemmatic choice (AV
208/223).
These historical exemplars of practical reason are so unexpected, so provocative, even so perverse, that it is hard not to pick at them to see whether the whole story might not begin to unravel. Though Aristotle clearly draws his notion of phronesis from reflection on how the wisest of his contemporaries characteristically behaved, he pays very little attention to the detail of the moral dilemmas which having this virtue of practical wisdom might be supposed to help to clarify and resolve. Maclntyres picture of Montrose as a tragic hero seems very remote from Aristotles conception of the man with the practical wisdom to balance the claims of competing goods and goals. The kind of account which Maclntyre offers of moral conflict is, as he says himself (AV 167 / 179), quite incompatible with what we find in Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas. By introducing moral dilemmas in the sense of rationally
35
irresolvable conflicts of goods and goals, Maclntyre rejects the ancient thesis of the unity of the virtues and thereby subverts the Thomistic Aristotelianism which he envisages as the only way out of the liberalindividualist ethics of modernity. In effect, in After Virtue, Maclntyre modernizes Thomist ethics, thereby producing something very like the kind of liberal pluralism which is as characteristic a modem error as the various monistic moral theories that he wants us to reject. Never mind Cardinal Pole (1500-58, the last Archbishop of Canterbury to be in communion with Rome) - what about the Marquis of Montrose? Like many another young Scot of his generation Maclntyre must (I think) have been brought up on the works of John Buchan - in whose superb biography Montrose (1928) the Marquis turns out in the end to be one who did not drug his soul with easy loyalties, but faced the problem of his times unflinchingly, and reached conclusions which had to wait for nearly two hundred years till they could be restated with some hope of acceptance. In virtue of his achievement (the brilliant victories of 1644-45), Montrose must stand as the foremost Scottish man of action: The complete paladin, full of courtesy and grace ... Montrose was armed and mailed Reason, Philosophy with its sword unsheathed ... The springs of his being were a pellucid reasonableness of soul, joined to a power of absorption in duty which is commonly found only in the ranks of fanaticism; and much else in the same vein. Montrose was among the first to sign the National Covenant of 1638, which he regarded to the end of his life as an entirely proper attempt to warn Charles I not to go too far in support of episcopalianism in the reformed Church of Scotland. But by 1643 and the Solemn League and Covenant, when the Kirk agreed to send an army to help the English parliamentarians, Montrose felt bound to change sides. Thus he found himself in a situationdefined by the necessity of tragic, dilemmatic choice. As a moderate Covenanter who opposed royal
absolutism and a Cavalier who feared Presbyterian fanaticism, he had to choose, in a tragic situation, between rival goods - both of the alternative courses of action which confront the individual have to be recognized as leading to some authentic and substantial good (A V
208/224).
Presbyterian mythology Montrose is regarded as simply a biography, Montrose: For Covenant and Edward Cowan writes (p. 101): He was not the highKing (1977), minded, high-principled, consistent paragon created by some of his admirers; he was a man wracked by doubts and uncertainties desperately trying to understand and come to terms with a situation created by history. David Matthew, in Scotland under Charles 1 (1955), refers to the embarrassment of Montroses legend (p. 270), conceding that he was consistent but only in being impetuous, proud, and antiturncoat. In the best modern
In
clerical.
— 36 —
Does the story of the chameleon-like figure of the first Marquis of Montrose really suggest that he was much good at knowing how to select among the relevant stack of maxims and how to apply them in particular situations? A gallant and honourable young man (no doubt) who had little experience of politics and none of war, he might have fitted Aristotles description of those who are rash, hairbrained, noble only in the way in which he faced his and vainglorious execution. Incidentally, Robert Sanderson, one of the greatest Anglican moral theologians, whose De Obligatione Conscientiae is a major work of casuistry, was deprived of his chair at Oxford (though not of his head) by Puritan Visitors because he too had opposed the Solemn League and Covenant.
-
Modern Moral Theories The point about Cardinal Pole and the Marquis of Montrose, according to Maclntyre, is that their lives exemplify one way in which the choice between rival goods in a tragic situation differs from the modern choice between incommensurable moral premises (AV 208/224). Here, that is to say, Maclntyre lets us see what it means to be modern in the ways which he is out to expose and discredit. The modern assumption is that either we can admit the existence of rival and contingently incompatible goods which make incompatible claims to our practical allegiance or we can believe in some determinate conception of the good life for man - but that these are mutually alternatives (AV 208/223). As adherents of modernity, we either settle for liberal pluralism in ethics or we plump for some singleprincipled moral systems, such as Kantian universalizability, the utilitarian calculus, or (worse still) pure emotivism. Maclntyre refers us to J. L. Austin, without specifying where he said anything of the kind. But it is certainly reminiscent of the kind of thing that Isaiah Berlin has been saying for years. Indeed, much earlier (A V 103 / 109), Berlin has been identified as the most systematic and cogent defender of the liberal claim that there is no such thing as one unitary vision of the world - as holding, then, that the alternative to monistic ethical systems has to be a pluralistic theory of the ends and values in human life, according to which there can be no one true account of the right goals for a given individual nor any single correct solution to what one ought to do in any given moral dilemma. Again, Berlin is said to be the one who has urged upon us strenuously the view that the variety and heterogeneity of human goods is such that their pursuit cannot be reconciled in any single moral order and that consequently any social order which either attempts such a reconciliation or which enforces the hegemony of one set of goods
37
all others is bound to turn into a straitjacket and very probably totalitarian straitjacket for the human condition (AV 134/143). The modem debate about moral dilemmas goes back at least to W. D. Ross. In The Right and the Good (1930) he maintained that only a pluralistic non-consequentialist theory could do justice to the complexities of moral experience. In particular, according to Ross, it need not be irrational, in a conflict of obligations, to feel regret and even remorse at being unable to honour one commitment even when one is perfectly certain that the other was stronger in the circumstances. If you think you have to choose between liberal pluralism of goals and values or one of the monistic ethical systems, that means, according to MacIntyre, that you are blind to the fact that there may be better or worse ways for individuals to live through tragic confrontation of good with good (AV 208/224). You thereby betray that you are an unthinking product of modern moral philosophy. What the cases of Cardinal Pole and the Marquis of Montrose exemplify, on the other hand, is the pre-modem view - which is that the choice between rival goods in a rationally irresolvable conflict of duties involves the individual in recognizing that either of the alternative courses of action confronting him would lead to some authentic and substantial good. By choosing one I do nothing to diminish or derogate from the claims upon me of the other; and therefore, whatever I do, I shall have left undone what I ought to have done (A V 208 / 224). That there will always be a tinge of regret at being unable to fulfil the commitment which one chose to abrogate seems a common enough experience but on any of the monistic ethical systems such a regret would be irrational. The moral agent as famously depicted by Sartre (the young man who has to choose between joining the Resistance and staying with his widowed mother on their remote farm) is, so Maclntyre says, envisaged as having to opt quite arbitrarily between one allegiance and the other which seems somehow very immoral. The only possibilities for the moral agent which any modern moralist recognizes, so he insists, are either to stick by some single principle (universalizability, utility, feeling) or to make an unconstrained choice monism or radical existentialism. There is no middle way, for moralists trapped in modernity, between submitting to a catch-all rule and tossing a coin. Whatever the initial apparent dilemma, applying the rule, whatever it may be, will always yield the one right thing to do, or else, since ones nature is ones own free creation, it does not matter which course of action you choose.
over
a
-
Tragic Dilemmas
For the
tragic protagonist, such as MacIntyres Montrose, however,

— 38 —
there
simply is no right choice he cannot do everything that he ought to do. By identifying himself as a Cavalier in 1643, in the actual
-
historical circumstances, Montrose had to forfeit what he would have done as a Covenanter of 1638 and it would not have been irrational of him to regret that. On either of the only two modem positions (varieties of monism or mere pluralism), then, what gets lost is the tragic element in moral life so Maclntyre thinks (AV 133/143). On the liberal pluralist story, genuine moral perplexity is impossible since there is never any right course of action for anyone anyway. On any of the various monistic ethical systems, on the other hand, there may at first sight seem to be a conflict of duties, but this will always be resolvable. Does Sartres young man stay and care for his mother or go off and join the Resistance? Which is the universalizable course? Which will promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number? Which feels right? Once one decides, it would be irrational to harbour regrets about not taking the alternative course. What you have decided not to do must simply be the wrong course of action in the circumstances and how can you have regrets about not doing the wrong thing? Maclntyres characterization of the modernity of post-Enlightenment moral philosophies thus focusses on their failure to take irresolvable and hence tragic moral conflicts seriously. But paradoxically, when he urges us to abandon the ethical systems of modernity and return to Aristotelian ethics, he finds himself in another monistic version of ethics which he at once has to subvert.
-
Aristotles Blindness to
Tragedy
The problem with Aristotle, as with Plato and Aquinas, is that they share a belief in the existence of a cosmic order which dictates the place of each moral good, goal, virtue or principle, in a total harmonious scheme of human life (see AV 133/142). Pre-modern ethics, that is to say, depends on a very deep view about the balance of elements within the soul, as within the body and the cosmos and any other living organism (see Stuart Hampshire, Morality and Conflict, 1983). The point about the key virtue of practical reason is that it enables the moral agent in any perplexity to weigh the competing claims and find the correct answer. What at first looks like a conflict of duties will resolve itself as soon as the hierarchy of goods and goals is recalled. In the case of Sartres young man, it would have seemed obvious to Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas that his patriotic duty to his country outweighed his filial concern for his mother - the common weal would always take precedence over family responsibilities. Claims and values in the ethical sphere could never ultimately conflict. Consider an example given by Germain Grisez (in The Way of the
— 39 —
Lord Jesus: Christian Moral Principles, 1983, p. 297). A teacher might have a conflict between a professional duty to meet a class, which cannot be taken over by someone else or made up later, and a family duty to participate in the funeral of a parent, which would require a days absence. If there were no conflict it would be wrong to neglect either engagement. It is a simple choice between two good courses of action. Because it is impossible to do both, Grisez rightly says, only one can be morally required. Of course you must consider the effects on individuals in whichever group you decide to join (your class or your family), and so on. Having done this, one possibility is likely to be identifiable as the proper duty to fulfil. One or other of the alternatives is likely to emerge as the better course, once you have tried to imagine how the others involved would react. If not, one may blamelessly omit either duty, Grisez concludes. No doubt one of the principal motivations in Grisezs discussion of apparent moral dilemmas, as in a great deal of casuistry, has to do with saving people with over-scrupulous consciences from unnecessary anxiety. But in After Virtue MacIntyre clearly thinks that this bluff way with moral dilemmas takes all the drama out of human
life. In fact,
as
Charles Larmore notes
(in Patterns of Moral Complexity,

Aristotle who looms
over
1987, p. 38), it is Sophocles and
not
Maclntyres first essay in search of postmodern moral philosophy.

The Sophoclean View
The Sophoclean view of the moral life reveals the superficiality and blandness of the Platonist-Aristotelian-Thomist conception of the ultimate reconcilability of all moral goods and goals (AV 133-135/ 142-143). Buchans portrait of the Marquis of Montrose displays a Sophoclean protagonist much more convincingly than an Aristotelian phronimos. With Aeschylus, but especially with Sophocles (Antigone, Philoctetes), we are offered systematic explorations of moral conflicts generated by the contradictory imperatives of rival allegiances. Maclntyre distinguishes this Sophoclean view from the liberalism which he attributes to Isaiah Berlin. According to the liberal view, when genuine moral conflicts arise the choice between the rival claims, goods or goals, is not expressible in a judgment with truthvalue (Berlins position being thus assimilated to Sartrean existentialism a highly contestable thesis!). On the Sophoclean view, in contrast, when duties and virtues are perceived as making rival and incompatible claims upon us, we cannot but recognize the authority of both claims and the authority of the claim which we choose to go against remains: our situation is tragic in that we have to recognize the authority of both claims (AV 134/143). In contrast to the modern liberal moralist, the Sophoclean believes that there is an objective
— 40 —
moral order -bust our perceptions of it are such that we cannot bring rival moral truths into complete harmony with each other and yet the acknowledgment of the moral order and of moral truth makes the kind of choice which ... a Berlin urges upon us out of the question. For the modem liberal life of itself has ... no form, save that which we choose to project on to it in our aesthetic imaginings (A V 135 / 144). For the Aristotelian, there is no tragic moral conflict unless we have a hero with a flaw-a flaw in practical intelligence which springs from inadequate possession or exercise of some virtue (A V 153/ 163). In a society in which everyone led the good life there would be no room for irresolvable moral dilemmas. In Christian terms, there is no tragedy but for sin. This view depends partly on Aristotles Platonic conception of the balanced individual. Mainly, according to Maclntyre, it depends on Aristotles misreading of Sophocles. The moral conflicts presented in tragic drama may often take the form that they do because of the flaws in the protagonists (Macbeth, Lear and so on). But what constitutes these conflicts as tragic, so Maclntyre insists here, is the conflict of good with good ... prior to and independent of any individual characteristics. It is failure to see the centrality of conflict of good with good in human life that blinds Aristotle to the true character of Sophoclean tragedy and to the moral complexity of human life.
-
Moral Dilemmas in Christian Ethics
The only resolution of the moral conflicts in Sophoclean tragedy that is available is an appeal to the verdict of some god (AV 134/143) a resolution beyond the protagonists death. In Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, however, which contains some fine analysis of Philoctetes, Maclntyre maintains that, while Sophocles may well have been invoking a theological framework and saying that, in a tragic dilemma, we always have to wait upon the voice of some divine being, such a is defective because drama is not the response inherently tragic kind of genre which can provide adequate answers to the kind of questions which the plays present (WJWR p. 63). Aristotle turns out to be not so blind after all. The moral philosopher now sees more deeply than the playwright. Without taking us through whatever arguments have led to this change of mind, Maclntyre now clearly believes that further reflection in moral philosophy will show that the Sophoclean moral dilemmas (conflicts of good with good) depend on some mistaken judgment or flaw in the protagonists character, just as Aristotle said. It looks, in fact, as if Maclntyres deepening commitment to Christian theology brought him to see, between After Virtue and Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, that no theological account of human life can tolerate the possibility of moral
-
— 41 —
conflicts that owe nothing to the human agents sinfulness. In particular, Aquinas is called upon in defence of the thesis that the dilemmas constitutive of tragedy ... always rest upon an underlying mistake (WJWR p. 186) a mistake on the part of the person involved. Arguing against Nussbaum, who holds (in The Fragility of Goodness, 1986) that Aristotles account of the virtue of practical reason is open to, and indeed a development of, the Sophoclean picture of an individuals having to choose between rival goods (like the Marquis of Montrose in After Virtue!), Maclntyre now endorses the Thomist thesis that, if someone seems to himself to be confronted by conflicting moral claims, he must be guilty (however understandably) at some point (however far back in his moral history) of some error or flaw (however deepseated) to which he is (however excusably) blind. Oedipus showed arrogance in thinking that he could deal with the truth; Neoptolemus went along with the plan to defraud Philoctetes. (Perhaps it was too obvious to say what Antigone did wrong or how her character was so flawed that her conflict of loyalties was not the conflict of one good with another that it has traditionally been taken
-
to
be.)
The
one
-
thing clear to Maclntyre now is that Aquinas is right it always human sinfulness, never the nature of things or the divine will, which generates the moral conflicts that we call tragic (WJWR p. 187). There can never be any irresolvable conflict of good with good, of one true moral principle with another, of one obligation with another for a Christian. Thus, Maclntyre has moved away from the claim that what defines the modernity of modern moral philosophies is their failure to make room for moral conflicts either because of their conflict-free liberal pluralism or because of some overriding principle. In his attempt to rehabilitate Aristotelian ethics in After Virtue he found himself including a notion of Sophoclean tragic conflicts of good with good which undermined the whole project. On further reflection, however, he has come to endorse Aristotles picture of tragic dilemmas - which means that he also accepts the Thomist view that there are no moral dilemmas but for some ingredient of human sin. Aquinas accepted from Aristotle the truth of the belief in the subordination of all particular goods and goals to the supreme good and final end. In reality, then, there can be no genuine incompatibility or incommensurability between one goal and another, or between one value and another. Of course people who are deeply confused or in a state of grave sin will often find themselves confronted with conflicting obligations. Given his belief in the necessity of divine grace for us even to be able to think straight, it is not surprising that Aquinas had no difficulty in acknowledging the existence of much moral perplexity (as he called it). But on his view, as now on Maclntyres, a moral theory which insisted on the existence of irresolvable conflicts of one good
is
-
42
with another, generated either by the nature of things or by divine intervention, could not be Christian. Moral conflicts are just problems of finding the right balance, in an ethical system in which goods and goals are ultimately compatible in an all-inclusive hierarchy. For Aristotle, as for Plato and certainly for Aquinas, any moral theory which is true to the nature of things is monistic because it is (however
implicitly) theological.
Conflicts of values or principles which depend on some human at some stage for their existence are one thing. There is of course no simple rule in Thomistic moral theory to resolve such conflicts, in the way that Kantian universaliability, the utilitarian calculus or what just feels right is supposed to be able to. Such dilemmas are common, often deeply distressing and sometimes beyond any satisfactory solution. This is where any moral theory requires to be balanced by the practice of casuistry which, incidentally, is not the invention of medieval Catholicism: we have lists of textbook hard cases from the Stoics, together with the answers to them. (If there is any disaster in the history of modern Christian ethics it is surely the tendency to set moral theory and the discussion of hard cases over against each other.) There will certainly be conflicts of one good with another, and one goal with another, in moral theories which have no theological as W. D. Ross, Isaiah Berlin and many component at any level others say. The Thomistic Aristotelian analysis of such moral conflicts would, however, take the moral element out of them. Which course of action Sartres young man should take, which obligation Grisezs teacher should honour, simply turn out to be practical quaestions which is why neither Aristotle nor Aquinas pays much attention to such dilemmas. From the fact that I have a duty to do one thing or another, it does not follow that I have a duty to do both. No blame attaches to me, as Grisez says, from my having to disregard one of the two rival commitments. If ex hypothesi the moral claims are symmetrical, my decision will have to be made on perfectly straightforward nonmoral grounds. It seems to be a moral question only if it is assumed that any practical question about what to do in a situation in which obligations are involved must be a moral question. But that does not mean that people who have to disregard one obligation in order to honour another will always feel free of blame. On the contrary, in many everyday situations in which people have done all that they could they often feel guilty. A fireman who has rescued as many as he possibly could of the people in a burning building should not blame himself for the deaths of those left behind, whose lives he could have saved only if he had not rescued some of those whom he did. But, as everyone knows, this kind of guilt is often felt. That is one reason why counselling is offered to rescuers and suchlike in the aftermath of disasters. Whatever their personal religious beliefs, those who are called upon to offer counsel in such cases are surely doing their best
error
-
— 43 —
to take the appearance of a moral dimension out of what were in fact
simply practical problems.

Charles Larmore writes as follows (p. 150): We have to live with the fact that we have obligations we cannot honour. Our possibilities in the world are then too narrow for what we know we ought to do. We should not feel guilt or take the blame for the choices that we have sometimes to make between one good and another. Nor should we give way to scruples and anxiety. But there is a certain regret, a tinge of awe even, in Larmores remarks, which might be thought to disclose a properly religious sense of the finitude of the human condition. And the wider questions remain. Is MacIntyres second version of Thomistic Aristotelian ethics correct? Is a Christian ethics, such as Thomism, with no room for moral conflicts of one good with another, genuinely Christian? Is any moral theory committed to the existence of such moral dilemmas compatible with Christian revelation?
1 I am grateful to members of the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics for comments which have enabled me to clarify what I tried to say in the original version
of this paper Since I have omitted my section on Maclntyres conception of Thomistic T. H. Irwin, moral enquiry, may I give references to two fundamental studies? Tradition and Reason in the History of Ethics, in Foundations of Moral and Political Philosophy edited by Ellen Frankel Paul and others (1990) and Jean Porter, Openness and Constraint: Moral Reflection as Tradition-guided Inquiry in Alasdair MacIntyres Recent Works, in The Journnl of Religion 73 (1993) 514-536.
—
44Downloaded from http://sce.sagepub.com by Oscar Amat on November 20, 2007 1995 SAGE Publications. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.

Thomism Moral Theology After Macintyre: Modern Ethics, Tragedy and

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Studies in Christian Ethics

irmly denying that he is any kind of theologian, Alasdair Maclntyre

philosophy, Humean, Kantian,

Practical Reason and the Marquis

tragic protagonist, such as MacIntyres Montrose, however,

Charles Larmore notes

(in Patterns of Moral Complexity,

1987, p. 38), it is Sophocles and

Maclntyres first essay in search of postmodern moral philosophy.

Moral Dilemmas in Christian Ethics

to take the appearance of a moral dimension out of what were in fact

simply practical problems.

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