Yesterday, I accused the late Alasdair MacIntyre of committing the natural law fallacy in his 2023 essay On Having Survived the Academic Moral Philosophy of the 20th Century. To the point: he identifies a wide range of basic “goods” that are needed to lead a good life (see my previous post), but he doesn’t tell us where he got his laundry list from, or who is supposed to provide these goods. Today, I will show how MacIntyre tries to dig himself out of this deep natural law hole. As it happens, MacIntyre has a very clever stratagem up his rhetorical sleeve. Instead of trying to solve or refute the natural law fallacy directly, he changes the subject in order to sidestep the problem altogether!

In brief, MacIntyre tries to pull off an intellectual “bait and switch” operation! First, he baits us with his exquisite laundry list of basic goods. After all, who can object to such things as adequate food, clothing, and shelter, let alone love, affection, or practical rationality? But then, having lured us in, MacIntyre substitutes a new moral criterion or touchstone in place of his old one, for he makes no further reference to his laundry list of basic goods in the remainder of his 2023 essay; instead, out of nowhere, he announces in paragraph 27 of his essay “the discovery of the place that relationships structured by unconditional commitments must have in any life directed toward the achievement of common goods” (emphasis added).

To make matters worse, MacIntyre ends up digging himself into an even deeper logical hole, for he also informs us that the ultimate source of these supposedly unconditional moral commitments are “the exceptionless, if sometimes complex, precepts of the natural law.” But this conclusory statement begs the original question posed by the natural law fallacy: how do we know what the precepts of the natural law are in the first place? (Worse yet, if the precepts of the natural law are the same as MacIntyre’s unconditional moral commitments, then MacIntyre has committed a second logical fallacy: circular reasoning!)

So, what do MacIntyre’s unconditional commitments consist of, and are they really “unconditional”? We will turn to these key questions in my next post …