Tradition-constituted rationality: is rationality always tradition-bound, and does this make moral inquiry relativist?

Alasdair MacIntyre, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

There is no tradition-independent standpoint from which the rival claims of different traditions can be adjudicated. Every actual human inquiry begins from within some tradition — its conceptual scheme, its problematic, its canonical texts, its argumentative structure — and rationality itself is constituted by traditions.1 This is not relativism.

Traditions progress and decay; they progress when they resolve epistemological crises (where the tradition's own resources cannot answer questions raised within it) by constructing a new narrative that explains both how one could intelligibly have held the prior beliefs and how one could have been so misled. Traditions decay when they cannot do this work, when their resources are exhausted, when rival traditions consistently outperform them on their own terms.

The Aristotelian-Thomist tradition has the resources to comprehend the failures of its rivals (encyclopaedia, genealogy, modern liberalism) in ways those rivals cannot comprehend themselves. The relativist objection presupposes the very tradition-independent standpoint it denies exists.2

Sources

  1. If I am an historian, I must acknowledge that the tradition of historiography is partly, but centrally, constituted by arguments about what history is and ought to be, from Hume and Gibbon to Namier and Edward Thompson. Notice that all three kinds of tradition - religious, political, intellectual - involve epistemological debate as a necessary feature of their conflicts.
    The Tasks of Philosophy - Selected Essays Vol 1, pp. 27–28
  2. So it is possible for one such tradition to defeat another in respect of the adequacy of its claims to truth and to rational justification, even though there are no neutral standards available by appeal to which any rational agent whatsoever could determine which tradition is superior to which.
    After Virtue - A Study in Moral Theory, p. 11

Where the argument is made

  • Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988)
  • Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990)
  • 'Relativism, Power, and Philosophy' (1984 APA Presidential Address, in The MacIntyre Reader 1998 and Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation 1989)
  • 'Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science' (The Monist 1977, the methodological turning-point essay, reprinted in The Tasks of Philosophy 2006)

How the argument was received

The argument of WJWR (1988) and 3RV (1990). Defended in "Relativism, Power, and Philosophy" (1984). Engaged most pointedly by Nussbaum (charge of false unanimity / fideism), by Stout (charge that democratic public reason is itself a tradition), and by the analytic-philosophy mainstream that demands tradition-independent rational adjudication. The position has shaped contemporary discussions of moral and epistemic relativism and is defended in the secondary literature by Lutz, Knight, and the broader MacIntyrean enquiry community.