This week, we have been revisiting the late Alasdair MacIntyre’s 2023 essay On Having Survived the Academic Moral Philosophy of the 20th Century. To recap, although I agree with MacIntyre’s diagnosis of philosophy (see here), his proposed remedy or scholarly cure is an impotent one for two reasons: he commits the natural law fallacy (here), and then he tries to pull off the old “bait and switch” trick (here), i.e. he substitutes a new moral criterion (the idea of “unconditional commitments”) in place of his original one (the telos of basic goods). Today, I will pick up where I last left off by asking: what do MacIntyre’s “unconditional commitments” consist of, and are they really “unconditional”?

To the point, MacIntyre is not only able to identify three “unconditional commitments” or Kantian moral duties in paragraph 24 of his essay; he also explains the underlying rationale or common thread tying them together: “I am bound by certain unconditional commitments—commitments not to harm the innocent, to be truthful, [and] to keep our promises, commitments that allow us to reason together without the distortions that arise from fears of force and fraud ….” Okay, fine, but who hasn’t broken a promise or told a lie? More generally, why are these three commitments or moral duties “unconditional”?

For my part, I am totally willing to concede that most people would agree with MacIntyre’s three general moral principles or commitments. As a general rule, we should avoid harming others, we should keep our promises, and we should tell the truth. The problem, however, is that rules, even moral ones, are never unconditional. Simply invoking a general moral rule in favor of harm-avoidance, truth-telling, or promise-keeping, or calling these general rules “unconditional commitments” as MacIntyre does, won’t get us very far. Why not? Because almost every legal or moral rule, no matter how important, usually has one or more exceptions.

Consider, for example, the third of MacIntyre’s unconditional commitments: promise-keeping. Is it really never morally permissible to break a promise? What about immoral or illegal promises? Or promises made under false pretenses? Or promises made under duress? Or what if keeping a promise, however procured, would itself produce a harm? As it happens, one of the things that struck me the most when I first studied the literature on promise-keeping is that philosophers and legal scholars are deeply divided on these questions. (And well they should be, since the meaning of such terms as “promise” or “duress” — or “truth” for that matter — is open to debate.)

Moreover, an even deeper logical problem is lurking behind MacIntyre’s analysis of unconditional commitments, a problem that bedevils the work of many moral and legal philosophers. Rest assured, I will describe this deeper problem in my next post …