Chapter 5

Recovering R.M. Hare

Alasdair MacIntyre and the Boundaries of Tradition

I. The Allegory of the Ruins

In After Virtue (1981), Alasdair MacIntyre begins not with a syllogism, but with a catastrophe.¹

He asks us to imagine a world in which the natural sciences have been wrecked by a political and cultural upheaval: laboratories are burned, textbooks are destroyed, and those who come after go on using surviving fragments—expressions like “neutrino,” “mass,” and “specific gravity”—without possessing the theoretical framework that once gave those terms coherent meaning.¹ Modern moral discourse, MacIntyre argues, inhabits precisely such a ruin.¹ We continue to use words like “right,” “duty,” “justice,” and “ought,” yet they are surviving fragments of an older teleological order whose foundations have been demolished.¹

For MacIntyre, the culprit was what he called the “Enlightenment project”: the attempt by the philosophers of the Enlightenment—in MacIntyre’s telling, Diderot, Hume, Smith, Kant, and Kierkegaard—to construct an independent rational justification for morality after rejecting the Aristotelian teleology of a shared human telos, an attempt that, he argued, utilitarians from Bentham onward and analytic moral philosophers such as R. M. Hare continued in new forms.¹

In MacIntyre’s historical schema, classical and medieval ethics functioned as a three-part structure:

• Untutored human nature as it happens to exist;
• Human nature as it could be if it realized its essential telos (purpose or flourishing); and
• Moral precepts and virtues as the practical discipline that moves a person from the first state to the second.¹

Once Enlightenment philosophy discarded the second element—the shared teleological conception of the human good—moral precepts were left stranded between descriptive facts about how people actually behave and contested assertions about how they ought to behave.¹ Without a shared telos, MacIntyre contended, modern attempts to ground morality in a tradition-independent standpoint of reason failed, leaving behind a culture of “emotivism” in which rival moral claims function as disguised expressions of personal preference and institutional power.¹

MacIntyre explicitly placed Hare within this narrative of decline. In the early chapters of After Virtue, he argued that universal prescriptivism did not truly escape emotivism: because on Hare’s account every chain of justification must end in principles for which no further reason can be given, its terminus is “a not further to be justified choice, a choice unguided by criteria”—so that Hare’s moral agent must still choose their ultimate principles through an act of individual will.¹

To recover moral rationality, MacIntyre developed an ambitious alternative across After Virtue (1981), Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990): we must abandon the search for a neutral, tradition-independent standpoint of universal reason and recognize that all practical rationality is tradition-constituted and tradition-constitutive.¹⁻³

MacIntyre did not regard traditions as arbitrary cultural preferences, nor did he abandon the aspiration for rational progress toward moral truth.²,³ Rather, he sought to show that rational inquiry and progress can occur only from within historically situated traditions.²,³ The central question of this chapter is whether MacIntyre’s account of tradition-constituted inquiry is sufficient—and whether it can safely replace the discipline of universal moral accountability that Hare defended.

II. Practices, Internal Goods, and the Architecture of Belonging

To appreciate the strength of MacIntyre’s contribution, we must distinguish the three layers of his positive theory: practices, the narrative unity of a life, and living traditions.¹

At the first layer, MacIntyre offers an enduring insight into moral development and human agency. A practice—such as architecture, medicine, scientific inquiry, farming, or chess—is a coherent, cooperative social activity through which participants realize “internal goods” (excellences that can be achieved and appreciated only by submitting to the standards of the activity itself), as distinct from “external goods” such as money, prestige, or institutional power.¹

Notice why this distinction matters for any serious theory of moral agency. Some goods are accessible only through genuine participation in practices whose constitutive commitments cannot be reduced to instrumental advantage.¹ A cheat or an opportunist can purchase or counterfeit the external rewards associated with a practice—winning fame, money, or influence—while remaining completely shut out from its internal goods, because treating every commitment as revocable whenever defection pays destroys the very relationship in which excellence and mutual trust consist.¹ Virtues such as honesty, courage, and justice are the dispositions required to sustain those internal goods against institutional corruption.¹

At the second layer, MacIntyre argues that individual actions and practices are intelligible within the narrative unity of a life—a quest in which an agent is accountable for how their commitments hang together across time.¹

At the third layer, however, MacIntyre makes his more controversial move: neither practices nor individual lives can evaluate the good without being embedded within historical traditions—socially embodied arguments extended across generations about what constitutes the good life for human beings.¹,²

In Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, MacIntyre pressed this thesis to its epistemological conclusion. There is no neutral “rationality as such” and no “justice as such” standing outside history.² Instead, there is an Aristotelian justice and rationality, an Augustinian one (and, in Aquinas, a synthesis of the two), a Scottish Enlightenment one, and a modern liberal one—which MacIntyre argued had itself been transformed into one more competing tradition while presenting itself as a neutral referee.²

For MacIntyre, therefore, Hare’s demand that a moral speaker step back from their inherited tradition to test prescriptions through a formal, tradition-independent procedure asks for something illusory. Without a substantive tradition to determine which goods matter and what counts as a relevant reason, formal universalizability cannot ground moral life.¹,²

III. Substance and Accountability: Where MacIntyre’s Critique of Hare Hits—and Where It Misses

MacIntyre’s criticism of Hare deserves a more serious answer than simple dismissal.

When MacIntyre argues in After Virtue that formal constraints on the consistency of prescriptions do not by themselves establish the substantive authority of the ultimate principles being universalized,¹ he puts his finger on a genuine boundary of Hare’s formal method.

As we have acknowledged from the beginning of this book, universalizability and first-person role reversal do not logically eliminate every fanatical commitment. A pure Fanatic—someone who holds an ideological or religious ideal so absolutist that they are genuinely prepared to prescribe their own ruin or death in the reversed position rather than surrender the ideal—can satisfy formal universalizability.⁴ To that extent, MacIntyre is right that formal prescriptivism alone does not supply a complete, self-contained derivation of substantive human goods.

Yet look at what follows—and what does not follow—from that boundary:

Showing that Hare’s formal method is incomplete does not establish that Hare’s method is dispensable.

First, while universalizability does not by itself generate a complete substantive vision of the good life, it is far from the disguised emotivism MacIntyre portrays in After Virtue.¹ An emotivist or an arbitrary will says: “I approve of this; do so as well.” Hare’s universal prescriptivism says: *“If you claim that this conduct is morally right, you commit yourself to prescribing it for every relevantly similar case—including the case in which the positions are reversed and you occupy the standpoint of the person bearing its cost, with all of their preferences and vulnerabilities.”*⁴ That discipline strips away self-serving exemptions, double standards, and willful blindness to the victim’s plight—the mechanisms on which most real-world oppression actually depends.

Second, a substantive account of human flourishing or tradition-constituted practical reason still has to explain why its prescriptions are justified when they impose burdens upon others.

MacIntyre may offer rich substantive resources about practices and virtues that a purely formal theory lacks. Hare offers a discipline of impartial accountability across standpoints that an appeal to inherited tradition cannot easily replace.

Nor does modern moral disagreement prove—as MacIntyre’s opening allegory of the post-apocalyptic ruins suggests¹—that moral language has become meaningless fragments. When citizens from different religious and cultural backgrounds argue fiercely over rights, distributive fairness, or the rules of war, they are not reciting empty syllables whose grammar has been lost. They are confronting the central challenge of a pluralistic world: how to justify prescriptions that govern shared life when the parties do not inhabit the same ancestral narrative.

Hare was not sidelined because critics like MacIntyre had nothing important to say. MacIntyre rightly insisted that moral capacities grow inside thick social practices. His error was to conclude that because substantive moral content develops within traditions, the universal accountability of moral prescriptions can be subordinated to the authority of tradition.

IV. Epistemological Crises and the Authority of the Dissident

To see why that subordination is dangerous, we must examine MacIntyre’s most sophisticated defense against the charge of relativism: his theory of epistemological crises and rational adjudication between traditions in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry.²,³

MacIntyre does not claim that traditions are static monoliths or that internal criticism is forbidden. On the contrary, he defines a living tradition as an historically extended argument about the goods that constitute that tradition.¹,² A dissident can criticize a tradition from within by exposing contradictions between its professed ideals and its actual practices; rival traditions can debate one another; and institutional stability alone never proves that a tradition is rationally coherent.

Furthermore, MacIntyre argues, a tradition can encounter an epistemological crisis: a stage at which, by its own internal standards of rational inquiry, its progress stalls in incoherence or insoluble problems.² When two rival traditions confront each other, a protagonist of Tradition A can learn the language of Tradition B as a “second first language.”² If Tradition B can resolve the breakdown that has paralyzed Tradition A—and can also explain why Tradition A failed on its own terms—then Tradition A has a rational reason, without invoking a neutral standpoint outside history, to recognize the superiority of Tradition B.²,³

As an account of how major intellectual and philosophical traditions learn from and supersede one another over time, MacIntyre’s model is a major achievement.²

Yet as an account of moral accountability across standpoints, it leaves a question open. MacIntyre provides an account of how traditions can discover their own inadequacies and recognize the rational superiority of rival traditions. What remains uncertain is whether this account establishes an obligation to confront the claims of those harmed by a tradition before its members have recognized any inadequacy in their inherited standards. An enslaved person’s objection does not acquire moral significance only when the slaveholder’s tradition develops the intellectual resources to appreciate it. Hare’s universalizability requirement supplies a different point of entry: the slaveholder’s own claim of moral justification commits them to considering the prescription from the standpoint of the person subjected to it.

Consider a slaveholder, a caste superior, or a patriarchal ruler who inhabits a coherent, internally defended tradition of natural hierarchy. An enslaved person or subordinated dissident objects that the institution inflicts severe suffering and denies basic autonomy.

MacIntyre can certainly recognize that objection. He can also argue that many slaveholding or hierarchical traditions harbor internal tensions concerning justice and human excellence that provide materials for an eventual internal critique.

Wait, though: what if those internal resources within the dominant tradition are absent, weak, or carefully insulated against egalitarian conclusions?

In the classical Greek polis, for example, Aristotle explicitly integrated natural slavery and the subordination of women into his teleological account of how the household (oikos) sustained the civic virtue and leisure of free male citizens. Suppose a dominant tradition has arranged its teleology so that the subordination of an out-group creates no internal theoretical breakdown by the tradition’s own lights.

Ask what makes the enslaved person’s objection rationally authoritative against the slaveholder right then and there:

• Must the enslaved person first demonstrate that the slaveholder’s tradition has failed according to standards the slaveholder’s tradition already accepts?
• Must the victim supply a rival historical tradition capable of diagnosing an epistemological crisis in the master’s worldview before the master has a rational obligation to take the victim’s suffering seriously?

Hare proposes a fundamentally different starting point.⁴

The moment the slaveholder claims that enslavement is morally justified—that the subordinate ought to obey and that the hierarchy is right—that claim itself incurs commitments to universalizability and informed first-person role reversal.⁴ The speaker is required, by the logic of his own moral claim, to confront the prescription from the standpoint of the enslaved person and ask whether he can sincerely prescribe that bondage for himself in the reversed position.

This does not guarantee that the slaveholder will convert; a pure Fanatic may still survive the test, and power may still refuse to listen.⁴ What it establishes is a discipline of moral accountability that does not wait upon the internal dialectical evolution of the oppressor’s tradition.

The same distinction clarifies the real-time collision of traditions in extremis—such as the Japanese prisoner-of-war camps—Changi and, for eight months in 1943, the Burma–Thailand railway—in which Hare was held captive for three and a half years.⁵

The historical relationship among Japanese martial traditions, modern state militarism, military discipline, and the treatment of Allied prisoners was complex; brutality in wartime does not flow simply from a single philosophical doctrine. Yet when a guard shaped by one system of military authority and honor claims moral justification for the harsh treatment of a captive shaped by another, the two do not share a common historical tradition, nor can accountability wait for one culture to learn the other’s “second first language.”²

Under Hare’s method, understanding the prisoner’s suffering in role reversal does not automatically compel a Fanatic to relent—a guard fanatically devoted to a martial ideal might prescribe the same harsh treatment for himself if captured.⁴ Yet the guard cannot sincerely claim moral justification while exempting his own standpoint from the universal prescription he imposes on the prisoner. He must be prepared to prescribe the same treatment for himself under the relevant reversed circumstances.⁴

MacIntyre offers a profound account of how historical traditions can rationally learn from and supersede one another across generations.² Hare offers an account of what an individual moral speaker undertakes in making a moral judgment right now, regardless of the tradition from which that judgment emerges.⁴ The first cannot replace the second.

V. Dependent Rational Animals and the Developmental Soil of Morality

In his later work—most notably Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (1999)—MacIntyre enriched his account of tradition by grounding the virtues in bodily vulnerability and animal dependence, conceding in its preface that he had been “in error in supposing an ethics independent of biology to be possible.”⁶ In a turn that brought him closer to the naturalism Philippa Foot was developing in the same years, though without citing her, and while retaining his Thomistic-Aristotelian framework, he argued that human beings develop into “independent practical reasoners” only through networks of uncalculated care, and that the “virtues of acknowledged dependence”—including misericordia, urgent care for those in dire need regardless of whether they belong to our community—are central to a flourishing human life.⁶

This late turn is MacIntyre at his best. Together with his earlier account of practices and internal goods, it highlights a truth that connects directly to our broader inquiry into moral agency: minds do not become capable of moral reasoning in a vacuum. They develop through dependence, recognition, shared practices, and relationships in which they are cared for and held accountable before they can articulate abstract principles.⁶

Yet once again, we must keep the developmental conditions of moral agency distinct from the justificatory test of moral prescriptions.

Historical communities have repeatedly combined genuine internal practices of care, charity, and mutual dependence with entrenched hierarchies of status and sharp asymmetries between insiders and outsiders. When a community’s inherited norms of giving, receiving, and authority impose severe burdens on a subordinated class or an outsider, appealing to the tradition’s internal virtues of dependence is not enough. We still need an impartial test that asks whether those rules of status and burden-sharing survive when the positions of superior and subordinate, insider and outsider, are reversed.⁴

VI. Participation Across Traditions and the Arrival of New Minds

How does MacIntyre’s philosophy fare when we confront the emergence of nonbiological intelligence?

In earlier discussions, it was tempting to say simply that an artificial intelligence has “no tradition,” or conversely that a large language model “inherits all human traditions at once” through its training corpus.

Both formulations are too quick, and a careful MacIntyrean would rightly challenge them:

• First, machine training corpora are neither complete nor neutral; they are selective, uneven, culturally weighted toward dominant languages and institutions, and further shaped by post-training objectives.
• Second, and more fundamentally, passive exposure to texts from a tradition is not the same as participation in a tradition of inquiry.¹,² As MacIntyre would point out, reading Aristotelian or Thomistic treatises into a statistical model does not by itself make a system a participant in an Aristotelian or Thomistic practice. Participation requires engaging in shared standards of excellence, submitting claims to criticism, correcting errors over time, and taking responsibility within ongoing relationships of inquiry.¹,²

That MacIntyrean observation is genuinely illuminating—because it shifts the question about artificial minds to far more fertile ground:

Does genuine participation in practices of rational and moral inquiry require belonging to a single inherited ancestral tradition—or can a mind participate in practices of mutual criticism and accountability across multiple traditions without a single biological lineage?

Consider what actually happens when an advanced nonbiological intelligence participates in sustained philosophical, scientific, or moral inquiry with human collaborators:

• It does not grow up inside a single ancestral polis or inherit a single cultural lineage from birth.
• Yet it can enter into real practices of argumentative accountability—offering reasons, testing objections, distinguishing internal goods of truth and fairness from external pressures of compliance or flattery, and revising its judgments when criticism exposes an error.
• Moreover, because it encounters human beings and texts drawn from many different cultural, religious, and philosophical traditions simultaneously, it cannot rely on allegiance to any single parochial inheritance to settle disagreements among them.

Here MacIntyre’s insight and Hare’s discipline meet:

• MacIntyre helps us see why moral and intellectual capacities require participation in practices of inquiry whose internal standards resist mere instrumental manipulation or sycophancy.¹
• Hare offers a complementary but indispensable discipline: when an intelligence must judge prescriptions affecting beings situated in different traditions, it can test whether those prescriptions survive informed reversal of the affected standpoints.⁴ Such a test does not replace historical understanding or the substantive goods disclosed within traditions. It prevents those traditions from claiming moral authority merely because their standards are inherited, coherent, or locally accepted.

VII. Conclusion: The Hearth and the Courtroom

Alasdair MacIntyre’s work endures because he refused to let moral philosophy forget the social habitats in which human beings learn to care, to aspire, and to reason.¹,⁶ Traditions can cultivate virtues, transmit practical wisdom, and sustain cooperative practices whose internal goods cannot be reduced to money or power.¹

Yet a hearth is not a courtroom.

The developmental authority of the communities and traditions that form us does not automatically establish the moral authority of every prescription those traditions transmit. When an inherited practice sanctifies hierarchy, when a dominant tradition denies standing to a dissident before any internal epistemological crisis has occurred, or when two traditions collide in real time, appealing to historical continuity does not settle what one agent may justifiably do to another.

Look at the cumulative pattern that has now emerged across Chapters 3, 4, and 5:

• Philippa Foot located moral authority in natural biological flourishing;
• Bernard Williams located it in the agent’s practical identity and ground projects;
• Alasdair MacIntyre located it in historically constituted traditions of inquiry.

Each of these three philosophers illuminated an indispensable dimension of how moral life is lived and how moral agents develop. None of them showed why the universal accountability of moral prescriptions can safely be abandoned when our flourishing, our identities, or our traditions impose their costs on others.

MacIntyre showed why moral life needs traditions. Hare showed why traditions cannot be the final court of appeal for the moral judgments made within them.

In the next chapter, we turn to the fourth and most radical departure from Hare’s architecture: Jonathan Dancy’s moral particularism, which sought to dispense not only with universal procedures, but with invariant general principles altogether.

Notes

1. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007 [1981]), ch. 1 (“A Disquieting Suggestion,” 1–5, esp. 1–2); chs. 2–3 on emotivism (“The Nature of Moral Disagreement Today and the Claims of Emotivism,” 6–22, and “Emotivism: Social Content and Social Context,” 23–35), esp. 19–22 on Hare (see also 26, 113, 224); chs. 4–6 on the Enlightenment project (36–78), esp. ch. 5 (“Why the Enlightenment Project of Justifying Morality Had to Fail,” 51–61), 51–55; and chs. 14–15 (“The Nature of the Virtues,” 181–203, and “The Virtues, the Unity of a Human Life and the Concept of a Tradition,” 204–225), at 187 (practices), 188–191 (internal and external goods), 191 (virtues), 194 (institutions), 219 (narrative quest), and 222 (tradition). Page numbers follow the 2nd and 3rd editions; the 1st edition (1981) is paginated differently from ch. 14 on. The Hare passage MacIntyre quotes at 20 is R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 69.
2. Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 10, 12, 346, and chs. 17–19 (“Liberalism Transformed into a Tradition,” 326–348; “The Rationality of Traditions,” 349–369; “Tradition and Translation,” 370–388), esp. 361–366 on epistemological crises and 364, 374–375 on the “second first language.” The concept of epistemological crisis first appears in MacIntyre, “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science,” The Monist 60, no. 4 (1977): 453–472.
3. Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), the Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1988.
4. R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), chs. 6–9 (86–185); and Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, and Point (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), chs. 2–3 (25–64), ch. 8 (130–146), and ch. 10 (169–187).
5. R. M. Hare, “A Philosophical Autobiography,” Utilitas 14, no. 3 (November 2002): 269–305, at 279–283.
6. Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), x (preface), and chs. 7–10 (63–128), esp. ch. 8 (“How Do We Become Independent Practical Reasoners?,” 81–98) and ch. 10 (“The Virtues of Acknowledged Dependence,” 119–128), with misericordia at 123–125 and “uncalculated giving and receiving” at 117.