Whose Justice? Which Rationality?
MacIntyre's sequel to After Virtue — four traditions of practical rationality compared and the case for Aristotelian-Thomistic moral theory
Tradition: Contemporary virtue ethics / tradition-constituted rationality
There are no traditionless standards of rationality — only tradition-constituted enquiries. Four traditions of practical rationality, with the Aristotelian-Thomistic the most adequate
Whose Justice? Which Rationality? is the second volume of MacIntyre's trilogy on the philosophical anthropology of moral inquiry (After Virtue, 1981; Whose Justice, 1988; Three Rival Versions, 1990). The book argues that there are no tradition-independent standards of practical rationality — every conception of justice and rational inquiry is internal to a particular historical-philosophical tradition. MacIntyre then reconstructs and compares four such traditions: the Aristotelian (Athens), the Augustinian (the early Christian period), the Thomistic (medieval), and the Scottish Enlightenment-liberal (modern). He argues that the Aristotelian-Thomistic synthesis is the most rationally adequate of the four — it can give an account of the others' achievements and limitations that they cannot give of themselves. The book is a major statement of "tradition-constituted enquiry" and a foundational text for contemporary virtue ethics, narrative ethics, and the renewed engagement with Aristotle and Aquinas in moral philosophy.
Author
Editions cited
- Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (University of Notre Dame Press, 1988)
- After Virtue (1981); Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988); Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990) — the trilogy
School Embodiments
The book's constructive proposal is the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition as the most rationally adequate framework for practical reasoning. MacIntyre's subsequent intellectual trajectory carries him further toward Thomism.
"The Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, as the tradition able to give the most adequate account of the failures of its rival traditions." (WJWR, paraphrasing the central thesis)
MacIntyre's engagement with the Aristotelian tradition is hylomorphic at root — practical reasoning is the activity of a particular kind of being (human, rational, social, embodied) whose nature constitutes the relevant ends.
"Practices are forms of activity that have their own internal goods, definable only in terms of the activity." (echoing After Virtue, developed in WJWR)
A complicated relationship: MacIntyre is sharply critical of liberal-individualist pragmatism but his method of evaluating traditions by their practical-historical fruitfulness has pragmatic-realist structure.
"A tradition is constituted by an ongoing historically extended argument." (WJWR, central methodological claim)
MacIntyre defends a robust moral realism — there are real human ends and real goods — but argues that access to this realism requires standing inside a particular tradition.
"The relativist is wrong to think that no tradition is more rational than others." (WJWR, paraphrasing the anti-relativist argument)
A formal-philosophical affinity: the analysis of traditions as structurally constituted inquiries has structuralist roots, even as MacIntyre rejects synchronic structuralism in favour of historical-narrative analysis.
"Standards of rationality are tradition-constituted." (WJWR, the central thesis)
The diachronic-narrative analysis of traditions as developing inquiries has structural affinities with process philosophy, though MacIntyre's metaphysics is Aristotelian-substantialist rather than processualist.
"Traditions develop through the recurrent overcoming of internal crises." (WJWR, paraphrasing)
A retrospective affinity: MacIntyre's analysis of practical reasoning as embedded in a lived historical-social context has phenomenological resonances (he engages Gadamer's hermeneutics extensively).
"All rational inquiry is embodied in a complex, historically situated craft." (WJWR)
A negative engagement: MacIntyre argues that modern liberalism, severed from any thick tradition of practical rationality, slides toward emotivism and ultimately toward a kind of moral incoherence indistinguishable from absurdism — though he intends to refute, not support, this trajectory.
"The Enlightenment's rejection of tradition produces emotivism and finally moral incoherence." (WJWR, paraphrasing the central critical thesis)
MacIntyre engages Augustinian Christianity as one of the four major traditions; the early patristic phase he treats has substantial overlap with what would become the Orthodox tradition.
"Augustinian inquiry as one of the four traditions of justice." (WJWR, structural overview)
MacIntyre treats the Scottish Enlightenment-liberal tradition critically but not dismissively — it is one of the four traditions whose achievements and limitations he reconstructs.
"The Scottish Enlightenment's achievement and its limitations." (WJWR, the Scottish chapters)
A complicated relation: MacIntyre engages critically with Marxist-liberationist analysis (he is a former Marxist) and retains the concern with structural injustice while rejecting the Enlightenment-rationalist framework that liberation theology often shares.
"My continuing debt to certain Marxist insights, even as I reject their philosophical framework." (WJWR, autobiographical reflection)
Internal Tensions
Critics (Stanley Hauerwas with sympathy, Jeffrey Stout with criticism) ask whether MacIntyre's claim that the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition is the most adequate can itself be made without circularity — isn't the standard of "adequacy" itself tradition-constituted? MacIntyre's response is that traditions can be compared in terms of their resources for overcoming each other's internal crises, which gives a non-circular ground for ranking. The relation between MacIntyre's pre-conversion Aristotelianism (After Virtue) and his post-conversion Thomism (Three Rival Versions, Dependent Rational Animals) is an internal interpretive question.
I. Time
Traditions develop through historical time; rational inquiry is essentially diachronic. Time is the medium of philosophical progress.
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II. Space
The polis as the space of practical rationality; the community as the site of tradition-constituted inquiry.
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III. Matter
Embodied human life as the substrate of practical reasoning; the body and its needs as constraining the possible ends.
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IV. Observer
The rational agent as essentially tradition-formed; plural, embodied, active in inquiry but constituted by inherited frameworks.
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V. Energy
The intellectual-practical energy of tradition maintained, criticised, extended.
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VI. Information
Tradition as the storehouse of practical wisdom; continuous in its transmission, accumulating through generations of internal debate.
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Personas that cite this work
Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How Whose Justice? Which Rationality? resolves each dilemma
51 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 3 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 6 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.