The Privatization of Good

An Inaugural Lecture
AUtsdalr Macintyre
Alasdair Macintyre was installed in 1989 as the first occupant of the
McMahon/Hank Chair in Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. On April
18, 1990, he delivered his inaugural lecture, "The Privatization of Good," before
a large and appreciative audience in Notre Dame's Center for Continuing Educa-
tion. He invited three Notre Dame colleagues to comment on his presentation:
Donald P. Kommers, Professor of Law and Government, and Editor of The Review
ofPblitics; William David Solomon, Associate Professor of Philosophy; and Richard
McCormick, S.J., John A. O'Brien Professor of Christian Ethics. The following
pages include the inaugural address, the remarks of two of the three commen-
tators, and Professor Maclntyre's response. The editors wish to thank Professor
Macintyre for his cooperation in publishing his inaugural address.

When in 1879 in the encyclical Aeterni Patris Leo XIII contrasted

the moral and political philosophy of Aquinas with that of the secular
liberalism of the late nineteenth century, he directed our attention
to an area of conflict whose importance has not diminished in the
succeeding century. Nowhere is this conflict more evident or per-
sistent than in the radical disagreement between Aquinas and the
moral philosophy of modern liberalism over the question of the rela-
tionship between how the human good is to be conceived and
achieved and how those rules, obedience to which is required for
morally right action, are to be formulated, understood and justified.
For Aquinas, as for Aristotle, we can only understand the right
in the light afforded by the good. The good for the members of each
species is that end to which, qua members of that species, those
members move in achieving their specific perfection. The rules for
right action for rational animals are those rules intentional confor-
mity to which is required if their specific perfection is to be achieved.
The content of those rules, their exceptionless character and their
authority all derive from the end which obedience to them serves.
But they are not to be understood as specifying types of actions the
performance of which as a matter of merely contingent fact will
bring about some particular type of end-state. They are not specifica-
tions of means externally related to an end. They are rather rules
partially constitutive of a form of life, the living out of which is the
peculiar function of human beings as rational animals, and the com-
pletion of which lies in that activity which is itself supreme happi-
ness and which makes of the life of which it is the completion a happy

344
 THE PRIVATIZATION OF GOOD 345

life. So to disobey such rules in any way and to any degree is in

that way and to that degree to separate oneself from one's good.
And, insofar as anyone lacks knowledge of his or her true good,
such a person is also deprived of the only sound reasons for right
action.
This is not of course to imply that, either for Aristotle or for
Aquinas, human beings do or are able to begin with a fully-fledged
knowledge of the good and from it deduce the rules of right action.
Each of us learns how to articulate his or her own initial inner ca-
pacity for comprehending what the good is in the course of also
learning from others about rules and about virtues, so that, through
a dialectical process of questioning the ways in which rules, virtues,
goods and the good are interrelated, we gradually come to under-
stand the unity of the deductive structures of practical reasoning.
But what we thus come to understand is in part that, to the extent
that what we take to be the case about the human good is false or
confused, to that extent our understanding of the rules defining right
action will also be apt to be false and confused and that, to the ex-
tent to which we ignore or put out of mind or otherwise fail to take
account of the distinctive character of the human good, to that ex-
tent we shall be unable to provide an adequately determinate or
authoritative formulation of those same rules. Adequate knowledge
of moral rules is inseparable from and cannot be had without gen-
uine knowledge of human good.
It follows that on any substantively Aristotelian or Thomistic view
rational agreement on moral rules always presupposes rational agree-
ment on the nature of the human good. Any political society there-
fore, which possesses a shared stock of adequately determinate and
rationally defensible moral rules, publicly recognized to be the rules
to which characteristically and generally unproblematic appeals may
be made, will therefore, implicitly or explicitly, be committed to
an adequately determinate and rationally justifiable conception of
the human good. And insofar as the rational justification of partic-
ular moral stances is a feature of its public life, that conception will
have had to be made explicit in a way and to a degree which will
render general allegiance to that particular conception itself a matter
of public concern.
This is not of course how things are in the contemporary advanced
societies of Western modernity. What shared moral rules there are —
and later I shall need to enquire how far there are in fact shared
moral rules in such societies —are and cannot but be invoked and
346 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

upheld independently of any corresponding shared conception of

the human good. For as to the nature of the human good, as to
whether there is indeed any such thing as the human good, dis-
agreements are numerous and fundamental. This socially embodied
divorce between rules denning right action on the one hand and
conceptions of the human good on the other is one of those aspects
of such societies in virtue of which they are entitled to be called
liberal. For it is a central tenet of recent liberal moral and political
theory that public institutions and more especially the institutions
of government should be systematically neutral as between rival con-
ceptions of what the human good is. Allegiance to any particular
conception of human good ought, on this liberal view, to be a matter
of private individual preference and choice, and it is contrary to
rationality to require of anyone that he or she should agree with
anyone else in giving his or her allegiance to some particular view.
In this respect the status of conceptions of the human good is
very different from that of moral rules. Moral rules, on this modern
liberal view, prescribe those actions and those refrainings from ac-
tion which any rational person may require of any other. About
them, about their content, about their binding force, and presum-
ably about the appropriate ways of responding to their breach, agree-
ment among rational persons is therefore required. The type of agree-
ment required about moral rules by liberals and the type of
disagreement permitted and expected by those same liberals about
conceptions of the good can both be characterized in terms of one
and the same understanding of the relationship of freedom to reason.
The autonomy of a free and rational individual, according to liber-
alism, is not infringed by, but requires that individual to assent to
the deliverances of reason, where these are unequivocal; and so it
is with assent to moral rules. But where the state of the argument
is such that there are alternative and incompatible views on some
matter, and rational argument currently does not, and provides no
prospect of being able to provide unequivocal support for only one
set of conclusions out of those which are in contention, the autonomy
of a free and rational individual can be exercised in embracing any
one of the contending views. It is in the light of this contrast that
concerns about elaborating, defending and living out particular con-
ceptions of the good are, on this type of liberal view, to be assigned
to and restricted to the sphere of the private life of individuals, while
concerns about obedience to what are taken to be the moral rules
required of every rational person can be legitimately pursued in
 THE PRIVATIZATION OF GOOD 347

the public realm. So appeals to particular moral rules always pro-

vide relevant, although not necessarily sufficient grounds for advocating
legislation of various kinds, while appeals to particular conceptions
of the human good never do. Insofar as it is this liberal view which
has been embodied in social practice in contemporary advanced
societies, the good has been privatized.
There are of course important differences between liberal the-
orists in the ways in which they articulate their positions, but there
is also a remarkable degree of concurrence. So Virginia Held, who
expresses the contrast between the right and the good in terms of
principles denning rights asserts that "We can agree that persons'
conceptions of the good will diverge and that, although not all such
conceptions will be equally admirable, persons can legitimately
pursue a pluralism of admirable goals. But their recognition of prin-
ciples of freedom, justice, and equality yielding a system of rights
for human beings is not a matter of preference, or choice between
goods. . . . That all persons ought as moral beings to adhere to
principles assuring respect for rights can be asserted and defended"
(Rights and Goab [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984], p. 19).
Ronald Dworkin had earlier identified a distinctively liberal theory
of equality as one which "supposes that political decisions must be,
so far as is possible, independent of any particular conception of
the good life, or of what gives value to life. Since the citizens of a
society differ in their conceptions, the government does not treat
them as equals if it prefers one conception to another, either be-
cause the officials believe that one is intrinsically superior, or be-
cause one is held by the more numerous or more powerful group"
("Liberalism," in Public and Private Morality, ed. S. Hampshire [Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978], p. 127). And John Rawls
had already gone further than either Held or Dworkin in contending
not only that "agreement upon the principles of rational choice" is
presupposed in arriving at principles of justice, while in the case
of planning one's life in the light of some conception of the good,
"unanimity concerning the standards of rationality is not required,"
since "each person is free to plan his life as he pleases (so long as
his intentions are consistent with the principles of justice)," but also
that "variety in conceptions of the good is itself a good thing" (A
Theory of Justice [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University press, 1971],
pp. 447-48).
Notice that for liberalism understood in this way everything turns
348 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

on two contentions: first, that in the debate between particular rival

and alternative conceptions of the human good, not only has none
established a claim to decisive rational superiority over its rivals,
but that it should not even be a matter of public, as against private
interest how we ought to proceed in evaluating the rational merits
of rival claims in this area; and secondly that rational agreement
on moral rules can be —and indeed, given the liberal case, must al-
ready have been — somehow or other assured in a way which deserves
to secure the consent and compliance of all rational persons, and
that this agreement is available or can be made available as a key
point of reference in public debate and decision-making. It is with
this last claim that I am going to be first of all concerned in this
lecture. For it is a claim that we have the strongest of reasons to doubt.
It is not that we do not have a variety of recommended methods
for arriving at rational agreement of the kind required. It is rather
that we have all too many such methods, each of them incompatible
in important ways with some of the others, not only in the type of
argument proposed as appropriate for settling disputes about the
nature and content of moral rules, but also in the substantive con-
clusions arrived at about the nature and content of such rules. So
we have a range of types of Kantianism, a similar range of types
of utilitarianism, and ofintuitionism, contractarianism and various
blends of these. And since each of these rival and competing views
claims to supply the ultimate principles by which disputed questions
in this area are to be adjudicated, we lack any further rational court
of appeal, whose verdicts might settle such questions. Radical and
de facto ineliminable disagreement confronts us.
Moreover what these various types of philosophical theory mirror
are just the types of reasoning upon which ordinary nonphilosophical
reflective persons in our culture rely in their moral reasoning. Univer-
salizability arguments, utilitarian attention to consequences, intui-
tionist appeals to not further to be argued for principles of duty
and invocations of contractarian thoughts are as much part of the
common currency of everyday practical argument as they are of
the academic study of moral philosophy. So that we should expect
to find the same range of disagreements at the level of everyday
morality. But recently Jeffrey Stout has argued that this is in fact
not the case, that disagreements do of course occur on some major
issues, but that we have a stock of agreements embodied in what
Stout calls "moral platitudes," learned as children in the nursery {Ethics
 THE PRIVATIZATION OF GOOD 349

After Babel [Boston: Beacon Press, 1988], p.211). Disagreements

presuppose a background of agreement, for "we are initiated into
a moral consensus as very young children" (p. 43). Such differences
as there may be in modes of reasoning do not at least on many fun-
damental topics issue in significant differences in moral conclusions.
Against Stout I want to suggest that he is indeed right in thinking
that there is a consensus of platitudes in our moral culture, but that
this belongs to the rhetorical surface of that culture, and not to its
substance. The rhetoric of shared values is of great ideological im-
portance, but it disguises the truth about how action is guided and
directed. For what we genuinely share in the way of moral maxims,
precepts and principles is insufficiently determinate to guide action
and what is sufficiently determinate to guide action is not shared.
And this after all is what we might expect, if it were the case both
that the variety and heterogeneity of the types of moral reasoning
recognized among us issued in as wide a range of disparate norma-
tive conclusions in everyday practical life as it does in the realm of
moral theory and that a refusal, or perhaps a failure, to allow that
this is so was a prerequisite for the effective functioning of our cen-
tral political, legal and educational institutions. I take as a test case
for deciding the issue between Stout and myself, not those much
debated issues such as the wrongness of abortion or the nature of
a just war by focussing on which, so Stout claims, I have in the past
exaggerated the degree of conflict in our culture, but the subject-
matter of one of the maxims — platitudes in Stout's idiom —which
constitute the moral consensus into which children are initiated,
the matter of truth-telling and lying.
What is the shared maxim, so far as there is one, by which chil-
dren are instructed in this area by parents, teachers and other
authoritative adults? It runs as follows: "Never tell a lie" (this first
part is uttered loudly and firmly) "except when" (and here the adult
voice tends to drop) and there then follows a list of exceptions of
varying types ending with an "etc." We all agree on the maxim; where
we disagree is first of all upon which types of exception are to be
included in the appended list. Is it permissible to lie when the ut-
terance of the truth will be discourteous? Is it permissible or per-
haps obligatory to lie when an innocent human life is immediately
at stake? Is it permissible to lie when a lie just might contribute to
the future saving of such a life? Is it permissible to lie to save face?
Is it permissible or even obligatory to lie to help a friend out of a
difficulty? If I am in fact the best candidate for a job, but I will only
350 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

get it if I lie, may I lie? If it will serve the national interest or if

some highly placed official says that it will serve the national in-
terest, ought I to lie? If it furthers the cause of the National Rifle
Association, the ACLU or the girl scouts, should I lie? If doing my
job as journalist, a private detective, or an investigator of insurance
claims involves lying, should I change my employment?
There is no socially established agreement on the answers to these
questions. And both between and within different influential moral
and religious traditions, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and secular,
rival and conflicting answers are defended. But out disagreements
are not confined to the question of which types of lie, if any, are
permissible. For even when it is agreed by some large number of
persons that a particular type of lie is impermissible, there will still
be extensive disagreements as to how serious an offence it is to tell
that type of lie. We disagree as to how to rank order offenses against
truth-telling in terms of their gravity. But even this is not all. For
we also disagree about how lies, when exposed as such, ought to
be responded to by the exposed liar, by those who have been lied
to and by members of the society at large. Is it guilt or shame that
the offender should feel if exposed in various types of lie, and to
what degree, and what kind of subsequent conduct is to be required
of the guilty or the ashamed? When, if ever, is the liar to be pun-
ished or, if not punished, reproached or shunned and by whom and
for how long? From membership in what bodies should proven liars
be excluded? Once again we have a range of questions to which
different and incompatible answers are given.
Nor is it the case that different individuals each give one clear
and consistent set of answers to each of these questions, albeit dis-
agreeing with other individuals. To some significant, even if un-
measured extent these disagreements seem to occur within individ-
uals, one and the same individual hovering between two or more
rival opinions, inclining to one on some occasions and in some con-
texts, to another on others. Only thus can the inconsistency and
instability of our shared public responses to lying be made fully in-
telligible. For what is apparently one and the same type of lie will
among the same groups of people or in the same political institu-
tion be treated as a grave offence on some occasions, as a minor
offence upon others and upon yet others be simply ignored. In our
public and political life there are strange oscillations between wild
outbursts of self-righteous indignation on the one hand and com-
placent silences on the other. We do know from empirical psycho-
 THE PRIVATIZATION OF GOOD 351

logical research that lying is endemic in the population at large:

Bella de Paulo, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, who
studies lying by having her experimental subjects keep a diary of
the lies which they tell, has concluded that "People tell about two
lies a day, or at least that is how many they will admit to" {New York
Times, 12 February 1985, p. 17). And the indeterminacy of our shared
public maxims and the unpredictability of our public responses about
truth-telling point to widespread uncertainties about both our own
behavior and that of others.
There have been in the pjist and there are now rival and con-
tending moral traditions about what a strict determinate rule about
truth-telling and lying should in fact be. But these disagreements
were and are rooted in more fundamental disagreements about the
place and purpose of speech and writing within that kind of life
which it is best for human beings to lead. The determinate character
of such rules in each case arises from their relationship to and their
implementation of some particular determinate conception of the
good and the best. And whatever rational authority each may possess,
that in virtue of which rational persons ought to treat it as binding
is derived from whatever rational authority that particular concep-
tion of human good may possess.
As against Stout, therefore, and indeed against contemporary
liberal theory in general I initially conclude that a necessary precon-
dition for a political community's possession of adequately deter-
minate shared rationally founded moral rules is the shared posses-
sion of a rationally justifiable conception of human good. And that
insofar as appeals to moral rules are to play a part in the public
life of such a community, respect for and allegiance to that shared
conception of the human good will have had to be institutionalized
in the life of that community. On this issue then a Thomistic
Aristotelianism is so far vindicated. Notice that it is in an impor-
tant way a specifically Thomistic Aristotelianism which is thus vin-
dicated. In what way becomes clear when we consider a rival at-
tempt to render Aristotle's ethics of virtue relevant to the debates
of contemporary moral philosophy, one undertaken in different ver-
sions by a number of thinkers who agree in recognizing the superi-
ority of Aristotelianism to Kantianism and utilitarianism, but who
aspire to do this in a way compatible with a modern liberal alle-
giance. It is this latter which leads them to substitute for the single
and unitary, if complex, final good conceived by Aristotle a mul-
tiplicity of goods, each qua good worthy of being pursued, and each,
352 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

at least in certain circumstances and perhaps as such, incommen-

surable with the others. Which good or set of good any particular
individual pursues is to be determined by that particular individ-
ual's preferences. And the choice of any one such good or set of
goods will characteristically exclude the choice of certain others.
When Aristotle is thus emended however, practical reasoning,
as understood by Aristotle, ceases to yield unambiguous directives
for action. For the first premise of such reasoning —often of course
left tacit —is, as Aristotle remarks, of the form "Since the telos and
the best is such and such" (Nicomachean Ethics vi, 1144a32-33), and
where there are alternative and competing goods, each of which
may equally be treated as the telos and the best, there will also in
particular situations be alternative and competing practical syllo-
gisms with alternative and competing courses of action as their con-
clusions. So it will be equally rational to act in any one out of a
number of different and incompatible ways and nonrational prefer-
ence will have become sovereign in decision-making.
It is not then surprising that, while Aristotle found no need to
discuss practical dilemmas, this kind of would-be Aristotelian charac-
teristically finds them of notable importance in the moral life, for
practical rationality thus reconceived renders systematically indeter-
minate what is required of us in just too many types of situation.
So that if this were indeed a faithful rendering of Aristotle,
Aristotelianism would afford us no resources with which to chal-
lenge the indeterminacy of public shared moral rules in contem-
porary culture. It is only Aristotelianism understood as specifying
in adequate outline a single and unitary, albeit complex, concep-
tion of the human good, Aristotelianism, that is, understood very
much as Thomists have understood it, which is capable of challenging
effectively the privatization of conceptions of the good, their exclu-
sion from the public realm, that privatization which precludes the
possession of an adequately determinate, rationally justifiable
morality. But this is not all that it precludes.
For there are certain issues of the moral life which cannot get
raised at all in any adequately systematic way in the public realm,
if appeal to conceptions of the overall human good is excluded from
that realm. Consider two areas of concern often considered separately
in our society: on the one hand, the horrifying infant mortality
rate in the United States, one which comes close in some parts of
the country to ranking it with Third World rather than other ad-
vanced countries, and on the other the condemnation of the old
 THE PRIVATIZATION OF GOOD 353

in our society to boredom, nursing homes, and Alzheimer's disease.

What these together represent is a distribution of resources, such
that more and more has been directed to the mindless extension
of the length of human life by medical science into a more and more
mindless old age, while the unborn and the very young have con-
tinued to be radically deprived. And this maldistribution of resources
represents an answer to a set of questions which have not yet been
systematically asked, let alone answered.
Aristotle makes it clear that what the living out of the best life
for human beings requires of us is not the same at every period
of life; and in specifying what participation in which activities is
required at each stage in the movement from early childhood to
old age — on an Aristotelian view each age has its tasks and func-
tions, including old age; no period of life is functionless — and in
what the relationship between older and younger is at each stage,
one would have had to have made considerable progress in specifying
what the best life for human beings is. Conversely, without some
determinate conception of the good and the best it would be impos-
sible to provide adequate answers to these questions. So answering
questions in any systematic way, which could be implemented in
practice, concerning the overall relationships of the very young, the
adolescent, the working adult and the old within families, parishes,
schools, clinics, work places and local neighborhood communities,
so that we can agree in recognizing what the old owe to the young
and the young to the old, is a task inseparable from that of formulating
a conception of the good and the best. And when that task is one
excluded from the public realm, then it will become impossible to
ask and answer such questions, let alone questions about a just dis-
tribution of resources between the young and the old. The privat-
ization of the good thus ensures not only that we are deprived of
adequately determinate shared moral rules, but that central areas
of moral concern cannot become the subject of anything like ade-
quate public shared systematic discourse or enquiry.
Morality is thereby diminished in scope. And hence in part the
sterility of much public debate, on issues which are admitted to the
public realm, such as that of abortion. For what one holds ration-
ally about abortion is inseparable from what one holds about the
point and purpose of family life, about the place of the conception
and upbringing of children in that life and about the relationship
of family ties to other social ties. To abstract the issue of abortion
from these contexts is necessarily to obscure what is at issue. Moral
354 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

questions treated one by one piecemeal in isolation from larger con-

texts of argument and of practice always begin to appear rationally
unanswerable; and since, when morality is denned independently
of the good, the relationships between different moral rules disap-
pears from view, one result is that moral questions tend to be
presented as a grab bag of separable, isolable and so insoluble prob-
lems.
So we confront a situation in which there is great danger and
great difficulty. The danger arises from our inhabiting a political
and economic system in which a rhetoric of moral consensus masks
fundamental dissensus and moral impoverishment. The difficulty
arises from the fact that a standard liberal retort to the arguments
which I have advanced is at first inspection highly plausible. It runs
as follows.
Even if it were the case that the absence of a shared conception
of the human good both rendered our shared moral rules indeter-
minate and impoverished the definition of our moral concerns, we
could not find a remedy in the adoption of such a shared concep-
tion, for in our culture radical disagreement about the nature of
the good does seem to be ineliminable among rational persons. We
need do no more than point to the range and diversity and incom-
patibility of widely held rival and conflicting conceptions of the good
for this to be evident. But what ought we to conclude from this range
and diversity and incompatibility? Is it the case that there has been
somewhere or other in our past history a prolonged and systematic
rational debate, whose procedures were fair and impartial, between
such conceptions, whose outcome was a failure on the part of each
contending party to defeat its rivals, so that by the best test which
the resources of rationality can afford radical disagreement and
conflict has indeed proved ineliminable? The answer to this ques-
tion is "No." It is a piece of false mythology to suppose that our fun-
damental disagreements have either emerged from or been tested
by prolonged rational debate. Even such debate as has occurred has
been defective in at least three ways.
First what have in fact taken place over the past two hundred
years have been at best a series of particular and intermittent en-
gagements of relatively sporadic and unsustained kinds on partic-
ular, local issues and problems practical or theoretical. There have
been few occasions, perhaps none, in which one point of view, pre-
senting itself systematically and as a whole, has been able to engage
with its major rivals, also presented systematically and as a whole.
 THE PRIVATIZATION OF GOOD 355

And it is easy to understand why this should be so. The genres of

debate, the institutionalizations of the expression of disagreement,
either restrict it to the piecemeal treatment of isolable issues in the
more serious academic journals or to relatively brief and rhetori-
cally insinuating treatments in other media.
Secondly liberalism has played two roles in the modern world.
It has been and is one of the contending parties with respect to the-
ories of the good. But it has also by and large controlled the terms
of both public and academic debate. Other points of view have gener-
ally been invited to debate with liberalism only within a framework
of procedures whose presuppositions were already liberal. But, im-
portant as these two points are, they are much less crucial than a third.
Fundamental disagreement over the nature of the good is not
only a matter of theoretical contention, but also and essentially of
practice. It is rival conceptions of practical rationality, of the rela-
tionship of human beings to the good in their actions, of the practi-
cally embodied rules and virtues which are specific to each rival con-
ception of the good, which are in contention. And practical claims
cannot be made in exclusively theoretical ways. Certainly the theory
of practice is important, but only as in key part arising reflectively
from, throwing light upon and being vindicated or failing to be vin-
dicated by the practice of which it is the theory. Hence there can
be no genuine abstract, merely theoretical debate between rival con-
ceptions of the good. Such conceptions only confront one another
in any decisive way, when presented within the embodied life of par-
ticular communities which exemplify each specific conception. It
is in key part in the lives of families, parishes, schools, clinics, work
places and local neighborhood communities that any particular con-
ception of the good achieves recognizable form.
So just as we only know what a particular conception of the good
and the corresponding conceptions of virtues, intellectual and moral,
and of rules really amount to when we encounter them to some
significant degree embodied in the particularities of social life, so
also genuine debate between rival conceptions only occurs when
the actualities of one mode of social life, embodying one such con-
ception, are matched against the actualities of its rivals. It is as
it is concretely lived out that one fundamental standpoint is or is
not vindicated against its rivals. And my earlier criticism of liber-
alism was expressed in a way that was designed to recognize this.
My accusation was not or not only that liberal theory involves a
fundamental indeterminateness in respect of moral rules and of im-
356 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

poverishment in respect of moral concerns; it was that as such theory

is lived out in practice, this indeterminateness and this impoverish-
ment are exemplified in social reality. And correlatively if it is, as
it is, a Thomistic contention that the Thomistic conception of human
good can supply a more adequate determinateness in respect of rules
and a more adequate specification of moral concerns, that conten-
tion too can be vindicated only insofar as it can be translated into
the actualities of social life.
To say this is not of course to deny that any particular social em-
bodiment of any particular standpoint about the goods, virtues and
rules is always a more or less imperfect embodiment. But it is cru-
cial to note that a central aspect of any such social embodiment is
the institutionalization of standard responses to rule-breaking,
whether mild or flagrant, and to what are taken to be vices and
errors about the good; indeed without such responses there can be
no adequate institutionalization of rule-observance or of the recog-
nition of virtues or goods. So what would it be for us here now to
give particularized social form to a Thomistic conception of the good
and of those virtues the cultivation of which and those rules the ob-
servance of which are integral to the achievement of the good thus
conceived? And how would that conception, when thus socially em-
bodied, contrast with the actualities of recent liberalism? These are
large questions and here I can only gesture toward them. But even
such a gesture may be worthwhile. So let me focus attention on the
same two issues which I identified as relevant to the critique of liber-
alism: truth-telling and lying, and the relationship of the young to
the old.
Aquinas, like Augustine before him and Kant after him, but un-
like John Chrysostom, Benjamin Constant and John Stuart Mill,
held that lying is unconditionally and exceptionlessly prohibited.
Not all lies are equally grave offenses, but all lying defects from what
is required of us by the virtue of justice. If I lie to someone else,
I fail to give to him or to her what is his or her due as a rational
being. And since rational beings can only achieve their good and
the good in and through a variety of social relationships, familial
and political, informed by friendship, it follows that I both injure
those relationships and put in crucial danger my relationship to the
good whenever I lie. The virtue of justice and the rules of truth-
telling, which partly specify that virtue, are not of course means
external to the end toward which rational beings move; they are
partially constitutive of that end. So that, if and when I lie, it is
 THE PRIVATIZATION OF GOOD 357

not that I have been inefficient in my choice of means to achieve

my good; it is rather that I have temporarily at least put my good
and the good out of mind and renounced them. And if someone
lies to me, they have thereby affronted me by denying my status
as a rational being, and ought to be responded to accordingly. There
is no room for indeterminateness here, either in action or in response.
It is not of course possible to observe justice in speech merely
by refraining from lying. No moral rule, no particular precept of
the natural law, can be adequately understood in isolation from other
such precepts or from that good, movement toward the achievement
of which gives to obedience to such rules their point and purpose.
Hence we always need to supply a good deal more than the state-
ment of some particular rule itself supplies in order to understand
that rule. What else is it then that we need to understand, if we
are to make adequately intelligible the rule which prohibits lying,
and to do so in such a way as to know how to institutionalize it in
our practices?
Someone would certainly not have understood that rule adequately
who supposed that, while we are required to speak and write truth-
fully, utterance in other respects can be allowed to be whatever we
want it to be. It is to the place and purpose of utterance in human
life as a whole that this rule is addressed. The ethics of conversa-
tion, as understood by Aquinas, is a complex matter and there are
some important aspects of it with which I shall not be concerned
here. Aquinas, for example, devotes no less than eight questions
of the Ila-IIae of the Summa to types of use of language which sin
against charity and justice, characteristically uses informed by ei-
ther malice or negligence. And it is of course, on Aquinas's view,
the adding of malice to lying which makes of lying a mortal sin.
Nonetheless it is lying as such that is prohibited.
Moreover, Aquinas holds that the human good cannot be achieved
without games, jokes and dramatic entertainments — even inaugural
lectures perhaps —and failure either to engage in these, or to be
responsive to and appreciative of others so engaging, is both vicious
and sinful. So an institutionalization of any Thomistic conception
of the moral and political life will have to be one which provides
both for negative responses to malice and for positive responses to
wit and to laughter. And once again such wit and laughter and the
responses to them will, as Aquinas notes explicitly, have to be truthful.
But what gives to this continuous insistence upon truthfulness its
point?
358 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

A care for truth as a standard of rectitude in life, says Aquinas,

following Jerome, is a constitutive part of all the virtues. And al-
though truthfulness is a special virtue and an aspect of the virtue
ofjustice (Summa Theologiae Ila-IIae 109, 2, 3) the detail of Aquinas's
discussions makes it clear that all the virtues involve truthfulness
as part of their exercise. For all the virtues, moral as well as intellec-
tual, have to be developed throughout one's entire life, and this de-
velopment requires a lifelong process of learning and imparting
truths, learning in which reflection upon experience needs initially
to be guided by teachers who enable one to learn from experience
and so, later on in one's interactions with others, to contribute to
their learning as well as to one's own, and in so doing to learn from
them.
So mutual relationships of teaching and learning inform all well-
ordered relationships and consistent truthfulness is therefore an es-
sential ingredient of all such relationships. There is an informative
analogy between the high value which the modern scientific com-
munity sets on truthfulness within the community of scientific en-
quirers, a value expressed in the penalties imposed upon those who
falsify data, and the value which, on a Thomistic view, is to be set
on truthfulness within any human community. For, on a Thomistic
view, every human community is a community of practical enquiry,
the subject-matter of whose enquiry consists of everything actually
and potentially relevant to the relationship of the individuals who
compose it and of the community itself to its and their good. Hence
it is precisely as enquirers, as rational beings, that the truth is part
of what we owe to one another. And this enquiry is lifelong, having
at each particular stage of life its own peculiar tasks, tasks which
involve the contribution which those at each such stage have to make
both to each other and to those at other stages of life.
To spell out in full what this view of the relationships of those
of different ages to each other involves would of course be an im-
mense task, one in which Aristotle's brief, but illuminating remarks
on this matter would have to be developed in a way appropriate
to our own very different circumstances. But for the purposes of
my present argument I need only consider two related implications
of this standpoint. One is that we have to think of the old, those
approaching and at retirement from earning their living, as both
learners and teachers, as people who owe it to the young in a variety
of ways to transmit what they have learned and are still learning.
The grandparent and the great aunt and the elderly neighbor have
 THE PRIVATIZATION OF GOOD 359

to be once again thought of as teachers, so reconstituting one older

type of family. How are they to do this? In part it will be through
telling stories, in part through instructing in the performance of
tasks, through making the past present and restoring those various
links to the past which modern social mobility and the increasing
brevity of the modern attention span all too often break.
Another implication is that we have to stop thinking of teaching
and learning as activities restricted to specialized, compartmental-
ized areas of life within schools, colleges and universities. Of course
schools, colleges and universities have their own highly specific tasks,
but these tasks need to be defined in terms of their contribution
to lifelong learning and teaching, most of it carried out in non-
scholastic and nonacademic contexts. We need, that is, to think of
formal academic education not primarily as a preparation for some-
thing else, a life of work, which terminates when that life of work
begins, but rather as itself the beginning of, and the providing of
skills, virtues and resources for, a lifelong education directed to-
ward and informed by the achievement of the good.
We need, for example, to teach our students to read, so that they
go on reading throughout their lives. We need to make such reading
a way of illuminating their social relationships, so that their familial
and communal lives continue to be enriched by a stock of common
reading. We need to rethink the time-scale of education so that we
make one of the tests of the adequacy of what we teach now the
answer to the question: "What will our students be reading when
they are forty, sixty, seventy-five?" and to accept that if they are not
then returning to the Republic and the Confessions, to Don Quixote and
Dostoievski and Borges, we will have failed as teachers.
It is within this kind of overall perspective that moral questions
about truthfulness and moral questions about the relationship of
the old to the young can be seen to be rationally answerable together
or not at all. And this exemplifies what I have already suggested
is true of moral questions in general, that we cannot expect any-
thing but frustration from a problem by problem or issue by issue
approach. To do so will be sterile just because adequately deter-
minate moral rules can only be identified and characterized as parts
of the specification of some particular overall conception of the human
good and how it is to be achieved. Hence rational debate about what
our shared moral rules are to be will always inescapably be also de-
bate about the competing claims of rival conceptions of that good.
360 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS

To this claim I have added another. It is that even such debate

can still be sterile, if it is restricted to competing statements and
arguments at the level of a theory which isolates itself from prac-
tice. The central weaknesses of recent liberalism are, on the view
which I have advanced, only to be understood in the light of those
institutionalized practices of contemporary American society which
give concrete and particularized expression to the present condi-
tion of liberalism. And correspondingly the strengths of an Aristo-
telian and Thomistic position will only become clear insofar as it
too is seen to be embodied in particularized forms of practice in
a variety of local modes of communal activity, in teaching and
learning, in farming, in craftsmanship of various kinds. Debate and
conflict as to the best forms of practice have to be debate and conflict
between rival institutions and not merely between rival theories.
Not everyone who contributes to the making and sustaining of
the type of practices and institutions which Aristotelianism and Tho-
mism require will of course think of themselves as Aristotelian or
Thomist. What, for example, Andrew Lytle and Wendell Berry, nei-
ther of whom thinks of himself as such, have written and done for
the practices of farming and writing provide as good examples of
what I am saying as any available. And to a Thomist this should
not be in the least surprising. For it is Aquinas's view that rational
persons, who are able to develop their practical rationality in un-
distorted ways, become natural Thomists without having had to read
Aquinas. But in our culture — indeed in any culture — how relatively
few of such persons there are!
The argument of this lecture began from reflections on the con-
sequences for contemporary society of the modern liberal attempt
to render our public, shared morality independent of conceptions
of the human good. I have tried to explain why this attempt is bound
to fail, by indicating what kinds of argument would have to be de-
veloped and sustained in detail, both in theory and practice, to make
an alternative view, one drawing upon Aristotle and Aquinas, rather
than upon Hume and Kant and Mill, compelling. Notice however
that the remaking and the sustaining of our own local institutions
and practices, which, on the view which I have been developing,
is a necessary first step in the transformation of public debate, let
alone of public moral practice, are primarily activities worthwhile
in themselves and immensely so, and only secondarily a means to
further outcomes. As to whether we can even contrive a reopening
of genuine public debate about rival conceptions of the good in con-
 THE PRIVATIZATION OF GOOD 361

temporary America, let alone bring such a debate to an effective

conclusion, the evidence, as I understand it, suggests that we ought
to be as deeply pessimistic as is compatible with a belief in Divine
Providence. But as to that remaking of ourselves and our own local
practices and institutions through a better understanding of what
it is that, in an Aristotelian and Thomistic perspective, the unity
of moral theory and practice now require of us, we have as much
to hope for as we have to do, and not least within the community
of this university.