Dependent Rational Animals by Alasdair MacIntyre.

[Many quotations and minimal commentary, like usual.]

Deliberation is what distinguishes us from animals. "They do not have to go through a stage in which they separate themselves from their desires, as humans do, a separation which involves a recognition of goods other than the pleasures of satisfied bodily wants" (68).

At some point in our maturity, we begin to ask ourselves, "What is it best for me to do?" as opposed to to simply, "What do I want?" (70). We are not always experts on what would be best for us to do, however, which is where the influence of community and authority aids in the development of the virtuous life. "What each of us has to do, in order to develop our powers as independent reasoners, and so to flourish qua members of our species, is to make the transition from accepting what we are taught by those earliest teachers to making our own independent judgments that we are able to justify rationally to ourselves and to others as furnishing us with good reasons for acting in this way rather than that" (71). Through the initial submission to authority, the individual emerges as an independent reasoner."To become an effective independent practical reasoner is an achievement, but it is always one to which others have made essential contributions" (82).

Separating one's desires from one's self is the only way to achieve this independent, practical reasoning. For the infant, affection and physical need are one and the same. The object of the parent is to gradually introduce to the growing child the idea that one should not blindly seek to satisfy one's desires, but rather act in accordance with what is right and good. "[O]ne outcome of failure to transform the attitudes and relationships of early childhood is an inability to achieve the kind of independence that is able to acknowledge truthfully and realistically its dependences and attachments, so leaving us in captivity to those dependences, attachments, and conflicts. Acknowledgement of dependence is the key to independence. For one consequence of failure to break free from such captivity may be an inability even to acquire an adequate sense of oneself as an independent person with one's own unity as an agent" (85).

So that we do not live in a "self-deceiving phantasy," authentic self-knowledge is essential, and this is achieved through the correction and advice of others. This requires "honesty, primarily truthfulness about ourselves, both to ourselves and to others." "If I am to imagine reaListically the alternative futures between which I must choose, the quality of my imagination also depends in part upon the contribution of others" (95).

Power is a dynamic that influences every interaction. "We have to learn how to live both with and against the realities of power" (102). Conflict is inevitable; we must deal with it constructively. "The worst outcome is when the rules that enjoin giving and receiving have been substantially subordinated to or otherwise made to serve the purposes of power, the best when a distribution of power has been achieved which allows power to serve the ends to which the rules of giving and receiving are directed" (103).

"[T]he exercise of independent practical reasoning is one essential constituent to full human flourishing." While one who is not able to reason is not precluded from flourshing at all, "not to be able to reason soundly at the level of practice is a grave disability" (105).

"Practical reasoning is by its nature, on the generally Aristotelian view that I have been taking, reasoning together with others, generally within some determinate set of social relationships . . . of family and household, then of schools and apprenticeships, and then of the range of practices in which adults of that particular society and culture engage. . . . So the good of each cannot be pursued without also pursuing the good of all those who participate in those relationships" (107).

Market relationships are never devoid of the human element. A man would never enter a butcher's shop and, upon seeing him collapse with a heart attack, immediately leave, angry that he did not get his cut of meat. "I will have obviously and grossly damaged my whole relationship to him, including my economic relationship, although I will have done nothing contrary to the norms of the market. . . . Market relationships can only be sustained by being embedded in certain types of local nonmarket relationships, relationships of uncalculated giving and receiving, if they are to contribute to overall flourshing, rather than, as they so often in fact do, undermine and corrupt communal ties" (117).

While the expression of affection and pity is an elemental aspect of the virtuous life, so is moderation and a conception of propriety. "Sentiment, unguided by reason, becomes sentimentality and sentimentality is a sign of moral failure" (124).

Political structures must give a voice to all, regardless of their ability to become independent practical reasoners, because dependence is a universal quality, varying only in intensity. "What I am trying to envisage then is a form of political society in which it is taken for granted that disability and dependence on others are something that all of us experience at certain times in our lives and this to unpredictable degrees, and that consequently our interest in how the needs of the disabled are adequately voiced and met is not a special interest . . . but rather the interest of the whole political society, an interest that is integral to their conception of their common good" (130).

The modern nation-state cannot provide the common good. "[T]he shared public goods of the
modern nation-state are not the common goods of a genuine nationwide community and, when the nation-state masquerades as the guardian of such a common good, the outcome is bound to be either ludicrous or disastrous or both" (132). Those who espouse virtue ethics can recognize the necessity of the modern nation-state and the essential national security that it provides. "But they will also recognize that the modern state cannot provide a political framework informed by the just generosity necessary to achieve the common goods of networks of giving and receiving" (133).

"It is by having our reasoning put to the question by others, by being called to account for ourselves and our actions by others, that we learn how to scrutinize ourselves as they scrutinize us and how to understand ourselves as they understand us" (148). By having to make ourselves intelligible, we discover who we are, what we are doing, and why we are doing it. The why is nearly always predicated on the question of the good that was being pursued in a given action. "Why did you do this?" is ultimately the same as "What good were you pursuing in doing this?" This requires "elementary truthfulness in our accounts, so that they can learn from us and we from them" (150).

Boastfulness denies what we owe to others; self-deprecation "is a refusal to allow others to acknowledge our contributions to their achievements. Both vices focus attention on us and obscure our relationship to others" (151).

"Rational enquiry . . . is therefore not something that I undertake . . . It is something that we unedrtake from within our shared mode of practice" (157).

"[T]he task of education is to transform and integrate those into inclination towards both the common good and our individual goods, so that we become neither self-rather-than-other-regarding nor other-rather-than-self-regarding, neither egoists not altruists, but those whose passions and inclinations are directed to what is both our good and the good of others" (160).