Sociological Self-Knowledge,Critical Realism,and Christian Ethics

Introduction

At the outset of Alasdair MacIntyre’s 2016 book, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, he notes that the book assimilates a great deal of literature in moral philosophy, but warns that ‘references to this literature are selective and few’, because not only would it have intolerably lengthened the book, but also it ‘would have made this essay inaccessible to the lay reader for whom it is written’. ¹ One might reasonably wonder whether the ‘essay’—really a sustained, nearly-book-length single argument—is in fact accessible to lay readers! But, unlike MacIntyre’s earlier volumes, it does eschew any grand historical narrative, and instead sets out to look at practical reasoning from the point of view of an agent. It starts from the problem of a life going wrong (pp. 1–4), and relates this problem to the question of desire, and specifically how one might be rationally reflective about desires (p. 8). From this place, the book offers a sustained argument for a ‘neo-Aristotelian’ account of practical rationality, defended over against alternative accounts, most specifically against, on the one hand, ‘expressivist’ accounts eventually best represented by Bernard Williams, and, on the other, something called ‘Morality’, which is a peculiar (and incoherent) oscillation between deontic and utilitarian modes of thinking (pp. 59–69).

From this description, one might think—aha, this is just After Virtue: Nietzsche versus Aristotle, accompanied by the ‘Enlightenment project’ that ‘had to fail’. In one sense, this is true. But in another sense, MacIntyre here has progressed (as he has previously throughout his long and winding career). One important point of development is the key role played in practical rationality by what he calls ‘sociological self-knowledge’. Recall that MacIntyre’s initial and ongoing concern (also exemplified in the biographical narratives that constitute the book’s final chapter) is error. It turns out that one of the most important—if not the most important—hedges against error is not a point from ‘within’ action theory, but rather from what he calls ‘sociological self-knowledge’.

Reading MacIntyre’s book, one might wonder: is it an intervention in ‘social ethics’ (as one also might surmise given the lengthy sections on Marx)? Or is it a book aimed at traditional arguments among philosophical moral theories, arguments that typically circle around particular individual moral choices? It should be obvious that MacIntyre’s work problematizes any such distinction. It is for this reason that I take it up.

The Need for Bridge Concepts between Social Ethics and Individual Agency

For a variety of reasons, Christian ethicists often sort themselves into these boxes. Christian ethics is in need of bridge concepts that enable a better, more precise conversation between traditional discussions of individual agency (practical reasoning, phronesis, etc.) and large, expanding literatures in social ethics and political theology. From the perspective of Catholic social teaching, Theodora Hawksley rightly notes that ‘the basic concepts of Catholic moral theology’ cannot ‘bridge the gap to an account of the social dimension of moral evil’. ² While, as Hawksley effectively argues in her essay, discussions of individual agency (like the traditional Catholic language of cooperation with evil) do not function adequately beyond classic quandary problems, approaches to social ethics often do not have a way to build a solid bridge in the other direction: to specific action from their sweeping analyses of large-scale social structures in terms of abstract, morally-laden principles. As I argue elsewhere, following a classic essay by James Gustafson, arguments in Christian social ethics often fall into approaches reliant on ‘prophetic’ or ‘narrative’ analysis, on the one hand, or into policy advocacy, on the other. ³ Each sort of analysis has important value, but they do not tend to enable a precise delineation of specific, action-guiding responsibilities.

Theological indictments of the economy might be taken as a common example of this limitation, especially in Gustafson’s ‘prophetic’ mode. Consider Kathryn Tanner’s impressive recent Gifford Lectures, Christianity and the New Spirit of Capitalism, in which she provides not only a well-informed description of our current system of ‘finance-dominated capitalism’, but also a characteristically creative engagement with Christian theological themes. However, when it comes to naming specific responsibilities, Tanner outlines an ‘anti-work ethic’, ⁴ which, while suggestive, raises many questions about exactly how Christians would practice their daily lives within current structures. A very similar example would be Pope Francis’s recent encyclical on reconstructing a post-COVID economy, Fratelli Tutti. Francis’s brilliant way with scriptural texts is evident in a remarkably powerful reading of the Good Samaritan story, which then leads into a call for economic and social bonds of ‘fraternity’ and ‘social friendship’. ⁵ Yet the connection of this theological vision to the document’s later discussions of specific policy proposals about immigration, political structures, and war is much harder to map, at least in terms of what actions are required to move us from (bad) point A to (good) point B. The point is not that Tanner and Francis are wrong, nor even that specific details are needed in Gifford Lectures or papal encyclicals; from the perspective of the discipline of Christian ethics, the point is the sweeping analysis is not clearly related to specific effective tools to get us from the level of the vision to concrete action guidance. Further, insofar as concrete action or policy guidance is given, it ends up being contestable—but not in a constructive way, because the tools that could help us see the logic (or error) in the steps simply are not there. Thus, a side effect is that those who disagree with Tanner’s or Francis’s specific proposals feel all too free to dismiss the generic principles, too. If Christian ethics seems to focus too much on certain controversial issues in biomedical or sexual ethics, it is in part because those arguments (at least potentially) get somewhere, due to existing (if always contestable) frameworks that guide specific act analysis.

In this article, I want to suggest such a bridge from large-scale social analysis to individual agency might best be constructed by combining MacIntyre’s ‘sociological self-knowledge’ with the meta-theory of critical realist sociology. Such a bridge ultimately allows us to understand both individual choices and social responsibilities in a more unified way. In this all-too-brief article, I want to sketch the conceptual bridge space to which MacIntyre and critical realism both contribute, so as to open the way for Christian ethical analyses of social issues to draw on these tools.

Sociological Self-knowledge as a Necessity for Practical Reason

MacIntyre introduces the notion of ‘sociological self-knowledge’ as what he calls a ‘third dimension of rational justification’ (p. 211) for ethics. Before defining what he means, it is important to understand the other two dimensions. The first is the back-and-forth of arguments and objections at the theoretical level, between different overall theories of practical reason. This, MacIntyre notes, is a third-person enterprise. We do it often enough, when evaluating bioethical proposals in competing theoretical terms, for example. A second dimension to justification is at the level of practice, whereby, in a first-person mode, an agent is able to narrate ‘the development and exercise of that particular agent’s rational powers’, and in particular ‘a history of how that agent learned to rank order goods’ (p. 207). Indeed, while this is articulated as a second dimension conceptually, it is understood as the starting place for moral reflection earlier in the book, when an agent faces a difficulty in rank-ordering goods or a recognition of a difficulty or uncertainty about past choices. Practical reason is first and foremost a rank-ordering of goods, including common goods. Recourse to the critical theoretical reflection about how practical rationality should work is subordinate to it, and serves it. Thus, what MacIntyre is depicting here is a twofold task of practical reason’s justification: the first-person, ongoing, often-tacit practice of rank-ordering goods toward ends, and the third-person, theoretical clashes of streams of philosophy.

What is missing here? As MacIntyre notes, moving to the theoretical stage may well not suffice to resolve the conflicts over which goods to pursue. He notes, ‘philosophical theories are only rarely, if ever, refutable by knock-down arguments. What we learn from the objections advanced against our theories is the price that we will have to pay, the philosophical commitments that we will have to take on board if they are to escape refutation’ (p. 210). So, for example, utilitarians are forced to come to grips with Peter Singer’s radical claims about wealth redistribution or the common problem that many bad things may be done in the name of supposedly greater goods achieved by a majority. Or the Kantian worries about what will happen if a Nazi comes to their door—or if they actually say what they truly think at a faculty meeting. And so forth. Theories can ordinarily hold up under cross-questioning, but only if they take on aspects that their advocates might not find palatable.

So, one might say, take on what is ‘unpalatable’ and defend your theory! But obviously one wonders what the limits are, since any position will require judgments about, as MacIntyre puts it, ‘which prices are worth paying’ (p. 210). It is here where the ‘third dimension of rational justification comes in’:

To have sociological self-knowledge is to know who you and those around you are in terms of your and their roles and relationships to each other, to common goods of family, workplace, and school, and to the structures through which power and money are distributed. It is to understand what in those roles and relationships is consonant with the exercise of rational agency and what through the contingencies of an imposed set of structures inhibits or distorts that exercise. (p. 211)

It is to possess a certain understanding of one’s orientation in social space. Earlier, MacIntyre had noted that acquiring truthful knowledge about our own placement in social space is challenging because we are always apt ‘to be the victims of prejudices that inform widely shared judgments in the culture we inhabit, prejudices that are as apt to distort the judgments of the educated as of anyone else’ (p. 112). Thus, a ‘first requirement’ of sociological self-knowledge is ‘ some degree of detachment from one’s social and occupational role’, as well as detachment from ‘those objects of desire that bind one to one’s social role, desires for success, pleasure, and reputation’ (p. 112). While what is required is ‘detachment’, MacIntyre also stresses that this is not a matter of ‘theoretical knowledge’, but rather a practical knowledge that may well be obscured for theorists. Indeed, as MacIntyre has persistently argued throughout his career, theorists of the social sciences have been most apt to conceal from themselves how their mapping of social space in fact reflects assumptions and interests to which they are blind. That is to say, what enables detachment for a tenured university professor is not more sophisticated theory, but a practical awareness of and detachment from the typical prejudices of tenured university professors! ⁶

MacIntyre directs us to a non-exhaustive list of considerations, such as our ability to understand and call into question taken-for-granted shared assumptions of a too-narrow pool of fellow deliberators, our possibility of seeing through roles that appear to raise critical questions about the problems of the social order but in reality reinforce it (MacIntyre uses the ‘court jester’ [p. 212] quality of established late-night-show hosts as an example of something that may appear socially subversive, but in fact is reinforcing; post-2016 life in the US and UK provides many other examples), and our appropriate envisioning of possible futures that are realizable—not sheer fantasy—yet still genuinely transformative of the present. Moreover, and significantly, this is not simply an individual ability: ‘Lack of sociological self-knowledge is evident not only in the activities of particular individuals but in how certain types of activity and certain types of social relationship are structured so that those who participate in them are able to function as they do only because of a shared failure to understand key aspects of their social existence’ (p. 213). Such is the fate to which MacIntyre casts in particular excessively-wealthy corporate officers, adding them to the ‘stock characters’ amassed in After Virtue, or perhaps substituting them for the ‘manager’, whose claims to expertise (and therefore to outsized compensation) are undermined by the inability of any decisive management ‘science’ to be established.

Ultimately, then, every moral position is open to the additional objection that a given agent practically reasons as they do because of some unconsidered lack of sociological self-knowledge. And the only remedy to this is ‘the quality of our relationships in the family, the school, the workplace, and elsewhere, something that goes unrecognized in the arenas of academic enquiry’ (p. 213). In practice, MacIntyre’s ‘third dimension’ does a great deal of work, when he returns to confront his most potent interlocutor in the book, Bernard Williams. It is Williams who stands as the best opponent to the Aristotelian, for Williams too has seen through the pretenses and irrationalities of ‘Morality’. Williams, like the Aristotelian, recognizes that there are multiple and various human goods, and that a good life is one where the development of skillful and consistent choice among them is a mark of mature agency. However, Williams (and other theorists like him) take this multiplicity of and disagreement about human goods to authorize a politics of liberalism and freedom. This is because, MacIntyre argues, Williams insists on ‘the first person character, a first person that is an I and not a we, of all practical deliberation that is an authentic expression of the agent’ (p. 224). It is this demand for authenticity, that a particular choice is truly ‘mine’, that ultimately makes it good, or at least is a prerequisite for its goodness. But this is in fact opposite of MacIntyre’s view: ‘What I am asserting is that such decision-making requires the existence of certain kinds of social relations’, in which mutual criticism and correction go on over time specifically about goods that are held in common (p. 224). ‘Authenticity’ in such a context may well be the greatest of self-deceptions. The difference between Williams and the Aristotelian at this ‘third stage . . . concerns the kinds of communities that we must inhabit, if we are to be rational’, communities that (as MacIntyre goes on with the argument) involve ‘a determinate form of life’, which realizes not only a biologically-rooted account of the good life for human beings, but even more importantly a supra-biological account of the distinctiveness of human affective capacity and its ability to be educated and evaluated and improved over time (p. 226). That is, to put it in the terms I use in my undergraduate classes, we are made to do things like play baseball, sing in choirs, till the soil, and a host of other cooperative activities where the shared activity itself is our constant object, and which we have to learn virtues in order to participate in more and more fully. Williams-esque authenticity has its place, but within the context of the pursuit of proper social relations concerning shared goods. To have sociological self-knowledge, MacIntyre is arguing, is to recognize that Williams has deprived his agent of it.

Critical Realist Social Theory as a Disciplined Means to Sociological Self-knowledge

How might we bring more precision to MacIntyre’s account? In particular, how might sociological self-knowledge extend beyond MacIntyre’s basic distinction of whether one’s telos is the ‘I’ of authenticity or the ‘we’ of Aristotelian common goods? In the rest of the article, I want to suggest how well MacIntyre’s account of what sociological self-knowledge involves dovetails with the recent advent of critical realist (henceforth, CR) social theory in Christian ethics. MacIntyre notes, in explaining how agents come to critically examine their own desires as shaped by norms, that ‘roles shape individuals, but individuals also shape roles’ (p. 134). A more concise initial description of the CR project could hardly be imagined. Spearheaded by the work of Daniel Finn, CR sociology offers exactly the kind of account of agent position that MacIntyre requires. ⁷

While a full introduction would go far beyond the scope of this article, CR social theory is formulated as an alternative to social-scientific approaches that assume structures and culture are merely a result of agents exercising free choice (e.g., rational choice theory) and approaches that assume agents simply play out, zombie-like, the defining norms of social structures and the cultural system (e.g., forms of Marxism). ⁸ CR, by contrast, is an account of how agents and structures each exist in a temporal sequence of emergence, where given structural forms and cultural ideas shape and constrain agents, but agents act amidst these structural positions and ideas in reflexive ways that can reinscribe or modify them. Thus, CR aims to better explain both social statis and social change, accounting for the causal force of both social structures and culture, as well as agency. Most importantly, CR avoids reductionistic social analysis. It rejects the typical approach that any social phenomena—whether agents-in-society or structures—‘can best be understood by reducing it to its lower-level components’. ⁹

In one sense, the point is trivial, but once it is made, one quickly comes to recognize how much social analysis tends to lack any explanatory precision on these matters. Too often, structures are presented as moving with inexorable force, until agents (somehow) ‘realize’ their force and (inexplicably) ‘resist’. In parallel, as Margaret Archer frequently remarks, cultures are described in terms of a ‘myth of cultural integration’, in which ‘the culture’ is a singular, all-consistent determinative monolith, eliding logical and causal explanations of relations among ideas and among structurally-positioned agents, without whom ideas can have no actual causal force. ¹⁰ Despite this typically monolithic account of culture’s force, somehow (some) agents manage to act differently.

CR instead analyzes structures in terms of agents entering into given positions, with pre-existing restrictions, enablements, and opportunities. ¹¹ While an agent must recognize these, they are never determined by them; the agent still faces choices, but only ever in relation to them. The position may encourage one course of action and discourage another, but the agent may be willing to ‘pay the price’ of choosing the apparently more restricted course of action. Analogously, what Archer calls the ‘cultural system’ is never a fully-integrated set of ideas simply ‘programmed’ into agents, but rather a large repository, always building up and shifting, containing diverse, internally-conflicting notions with which agents must deal. Additionally, the causal force of the contents of the cultural system must pass through ‘socio-cultural interaction’, where this or that idea at any given time is related to the particular (structured) social relations of agents. ¹² As with the positionality of structure, agents find themselves not determined by a single idea or relation, but in a situation where ideas and relations are arrayed in some distinct way. Agency involves what the agent does with these pre-existing ideas and relations, especially insofar as the agent finds (pre-existing, real) tensions and inconsistencies in them. A major aspect of CR is its ability to account for social change by a recognition of how agent reflexivity encounters not a seamlessly integrated social whole, but rather a complicated, provisional set of positions and ideas, some of which may present inherent conflicts with others.

CR offers exactly the kind of fine-grained analysis that MacIntyre suggests agents must possess: they must ‘see where they are’ amidst existing social positions, understand how this positioning inclines them (perhaps wrongly) to adopt certain ideas, and crucially understand how this location provides both perils and possibilities for their agency. They must also understand appropriately what change is possible from any given choice; the ‘imaginative possibilities’ to which MacIntyre appeals must not be too narrow (as might happen if they are perceived as overly determined by structure/culture) or too fantastic (as might happen if they cannot properly understand the precise nature of the real constraints and opportunities they face).

From Accurate Descriptions to Normative Social Guidance: The Need for Typologies of Structures

Even from this brief description, it should be obvious that CR is not a social theory that somehow provides Christian ethics with ‘answers’. Instead, it is much more self-conscious than most social science in not importing unargued normative notions into its theorizing about social relations. Indeed, this self-consciousness is crucial for Christian ethicists. In looking to social science to help us understand complex social problems, we can forget that much social science continues (erroneously) to hold what José López and Garry Potter call an ‘ontology of invariance’, drawn from a paradigm of the natural sciences in which certain conjunctures of events are taken to produce ‘laws’ that govern reality. ¹³ We should be postmodern enough (or at least committed enough to avoiding determinism) to realize there are no such laws; yet this should not be taken as leading to an individualistic atomism, in which we believe ‘there is no such thing as society’, nor to a ‘radical relativism’, in which all social perspectives are equally distorted and distorting. Society is real. It has an objective existence, albeit one that is not objective in the same way as physics is objective. Using CR tools, we can compare substantive accounts of social structure and culture in terms of which one ‘gives a better account of reality’. ¹⁴ Such an analysis does not (and should not) give us normative answers, but is instead a prerequisite for practical reason’s work of an agent seeking the good within such a reality.

So too MacIntyre’s sociological self-knowledge is not, by itself, a normative account of what to do, but rather first and foremost an accurate description of one’s embedded agential perils and possibilities. For both CR and sociological self-knowledge, accurate description must then be tied to a morally-laden typology in order to generate specific guidance for action. Daniel Finn, in the article in which he introduces the use of CR, explains that such a typology is the final piece necessary to move from a precise CR analysis of structures to judgments about ‘sinful social structures’, which are prominent in Catholic social teaching. In the article, he uses the example of a typology of ‘extractive’ versus ‘inclusive’ economic systems, which point us generally to two sorts of structured markets, one of which is consistent with Catholic social principles, the other not. ¹⁵

MacIntyre’s essay offers a different typology—but one that ultimately is decisive for his entire project. This is a distinction between enterprises oriented to common goods versus enterprises that involve individuals seeking mutual arrangements to maximize the satisfaction of their preferences. He distinguishes between what he calls ‘the ethics of families, workplaces, and school’ (p. 168) from ‘the ethics of market-and-state’. In the former, agents cooperate to achieve the common goods of the particular enterprise, ‘constituted as rational agents in and through their shared deliberations with others’, whereas in the latter, agents are constituted by ‘learning . . . how to arrive at a coherent and relevant set of preferences [as individuals] and then how to implement those preferences in the social world’ (p. 175). Going beyond the famous (or infamous) evocations in After Virtue of Irish fishing villages and a new St. Benedict, MacIntyre offers far more specified modern examples, from the Cummins engine company to the Japanese auto industry to earlier instantiations of the BBC—though he also throws in a (contemporary) Danish fishing village (pp. 130–31, 170–72, 178–80)! While the examples are still more suggestive than exhaustive, they nevertheless go beyond the tendency to equate MacIntyrean ethics with a pre-modern nostalgia. MacIntyre remarks that the Cummins engine company was successful for many generations, and quite technologically innovative, because ‘the company subordinated the need to achieve higher levels of profitability to the good of making excellent products, and individuals who worked for the company were expected to serve that common good’ (p. 172). What MacIntyre is suggesting here, in the area of economic ethics and work, is that the key matter for practical rationality is not a matter of rejecting ‘corporations’ or ‘modernity’, but of a sophisticated understanding of how the necessarily cooperative roles of any given enterprise are shaped to certain ends rather than others.

MacIntyre’s overall argument rests on more than simply this typology. One can see this in his final chapter, which consists of four biographical narratives. The narratives are meant to display, from the perspective of the agent in time, how agency works. A precise analysis of any of them is beyond the scope of this text, but certainly more is going on in these narratives than a simple application of the above typology. Instead, what we get is remarkably like a CR analysis of these striking individuals, discovering in and through the events and structures of their lives a place of coherent, consistent agency. Importantly, the implied critique in the contrasting example of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is not that she rejects Aristotelian sorts of community, but rather that she is insufficiently aware of the general prejudices of her cultural position, such that she cannot recognize the tensions between her care for Aristotelian communities and her general trust in the goodness of the American system. By contrast, MacIntyre’s other three subjects all come to discover, over time, the goods at stake in some kind of a conflict set up by competing social positions they occupy. Their success as agents is not a matter of happy endings, but of arriving at a place of sociological self-knowledge of their position and the choices it offers, so as to increasingly consistently and clearly choose the good.

Applying the Tools: Three Key Tasks for Christian Social Ethics

The combination of MacIntyre’s sociological self-knowledge, his typology of two different sorts of shared practical rationality, and a careful use of CR tools of analysis could have extremely wide and fruitful application in every area of Christian social ethics. I have already suggested elsewhere that CR invites us to look at problems of race and economic globalization in more subtle ways than some other Christian ethicists have allowed. ¹⁶ Another area of immediate interest would be the complex question of why and how Christians in different nations are attracted to so-called ‘populist’ political figures and movements. These phenomena are not only internally diverse (e.g., Brazil, the United States, and Poland are very different societies) but also these leaders and movements attract followers for a cluster of reasons, some of which may seem more aligned with typical positions in Christian ethics than others. A CR analysis of, say, the pro-Brexit or pro-Trump voter would resist the tempting for-or-against analysis that one often gets in the ‘prophetic’ mode—and indeed, perhaps it is exactly this sort of analysis, often given without sufficient attention to the social position of the one offering it, that feeds into what is worst in these populisms!

The key to all these possibilities is allowing Christian ethics to operate with more precision at the agency-structure/culture interface, especially with attention to three things. First, as CR most especially demonstrates, the key to social change is to identify crucial existing friction points, internal cultural contradictions, or oddly-conflicting positional incentives. ¹⁷ Social change happens, in short, when agents run up against structural and/or cultural sticking points that make simply ‘going along’ a less obvious choice. This is not a matter of ‘taking advantage’ of these anomalies to ram through a particular view, but rather identifying with greater effectiveness the specific kinds of things agents must do (or not do) that are both realistically achievable and yet also move things in a different direction. Too often, the ‘revolutionary’ mindset of imposing programs from above results merely in conflict—but no real change. In part, as I argue in my essay on critical realism and the challenge of climate change, this is because broad critiques often inspire either an overwhelming menu of small choices or an also overwhelming critique of ‘the system’ writ large. ¹⁸ Change fails to occur because agents are unable to identify the ‘acts that matter’, the points within the existing system where agents experience tension that might be better resolved by different action, action that over time has the effect of changing the structural incentives and the meaningful ideas encountered by crucially-positioned future agents.

Additionally on this score, as Archer points out, much social theory tacitly or openly suggests that social change happens only through ‘power-induced compliance’, that is, getting power and exercising it on behalf of your group is what makes change. This is a one-dimensional view of a much richer set of possibilities; Archer explains that it sorely neglects ‘the confluence of desires’ and ‘reciprocal exchange’ as other ways agents come to act in new ways. ¹⁹ Again, to use the climate example, while forms of government regulation are undoubtedly necessary for change, they are also insufficient; agents also find new possibilities of reciprocal exchange, such as through the advent of large-scale markets for ‘greener’ goods. Or consider the desire corporations have to recruit elite talent from a pool of young professionals who themselves desire greener lifestyle choices—such a confluence of desires caused the Marriott hotel chain to relocate its corporate offices from a suburban Washington, DC campus that required a car to a new center next to a Metro station. Archer’s point is not to neglect power analyses, but to expand the possibilities to find sites for agency that will change social orders.

Second, at the interface of agency and structure, MacIntyre’s key insight of a typology of what we might call good and bad ‘phronetic social structures’ should be widely employed by social ethicists. Whatever the social issue, there is a qualitative difference between genuinely participatory structures, ones that enhance cooperative agency for common goods, compared with structures that hinge on and reinforce a sense of agency based simply on maximizing personal preferences, limited only by (often apparently arbitrary) constraints of ‘Morality’. Indeed, as I mentioned, MacIntyre explains that good ‘decision making requires the existence of certain kinds of social relations’, that ‘we must inhabit’ certain ‘kinds of communities . . . if we are to be rational’ (p. 224). It is true that MacIntyre’s distinction—as is the case with most typologies—is drawn starkly. Some of his examples may be contestable, such as a case of the closure of some neighborhood schools in the beleaguered Chicago public school system. He presents this conflict as one between small, grass-roots groups fighting for their neighborhood schools versus powerful, entrenched city bureaucrats simply seeking monetary efficiency at their expense (pp. 203–205). Unfortunately, large public school systems are hampered by multiple, complex constituency groups, many of whom operate in terms of the self-interested model MacIntyre laments. In this case, the MacIntyrean typology could be aided by the tools of CR! More broadly, it is likely the case that many social scenarios involve a mix of structural positions, some of which support an Aristotelian approach to common goods while others do not. The value of the typology, hopefully, is not to take another route to oversimplifying social conflicts, but rather to unearth the sorts of positional incentives and cultural ideas present that enable agents more easily to act like Aristotelians—those who seek genuinely common goods in ongoing relations with others within shared enterprises—versus like self-interested preference-maximizers. Rather than simply condemn or extol businesses or governments, one might better map the complex forces and choices tending in one direction or the other. For professors, a careful look at different universities for these contrasting institutional moral logics might be very instructive.

Finally, it is important to stress that MacIntyre’s sociological self-knowledge is meant to serve a critical function within his approach: to enable the tradition-constituted agent, who has learned to properly order her desires from the authority of her tradition, to be able to know when to call her own judgments into question. MacIntyre is simply not a conservative, and it is a mark of mis-reading (whether among fans or foes) to identify him as such. He is of course well-known for insisting on the centrality of traditions for practical rationality, but at the same time, he articulates a consistent hostility toward the kind of uncritical ‘conservatism’ he identifies most frequently with Edmund Burke. ²⁰ The sort of sociological ‘self-awareness’ that a successful agent requires is about critical humility, not comfortable arrogance; it involves the ability ‘to see ourselves and understand ourselves as honest, perceptive, intelligent, and insightful others see and understand us, with the objectivity that is only possible from a third person standpoint, but a third person standpoint that we have become able to make our own’ (p. 161). This achievement of an objectivity about our desires that is not a (mythical) view from nowhere is not ultimately attainable by theory, of course. It is only through a narrative of one’s own history of desire and choice that one can come to see this; in such narratives, one ought to come to see how one’s deliberations with others were facilitated or impeded by one’s blindness to one’s own blindnesses. What CR is able to help with is pressing agents to become clearer and clearer about the positional structures within which they have chosen and will choose. We may not come to see perfectly, but we may at least avoid some obvious blindness to our own limitations of vision—and that means all of us. It is here where a careful use of both MacIntyre and CR might offer resources to increasing clarity and consensus on the freighted moral questions so prevalent today that circle around identity and oppression.

This all may seem complicated. It is complicated, because the modern social order is a complex one. It is true that Christian ethics is not physics. It must begin and end with fundamental Gospel narratives of the love of neighbor, the forgiveness of sinners, and the accomplishment of the works of mercy. These have a simplicity and direct power that can never be overshadowed. But when Christian ethics turns to explaining participation in the economy, politics, and a media-saturated culture, it should not be afraid to offer appropriately complex analyses. On whatever side of a large issue one finds oneself, Christian ethicists as scholars should resist oversimplistic solutions and the slogans that go along with them. There is a reasonable and appropriate division of labor between scholars, activists, and pastors; each can learn from the others’ distinctive skills—and their respective positional restrictions and opportunities. Scholars may be more like the research scientists who painstakingly work out complex mechanisms and interactions; good engineers and family doctors may not be able to run all this complex groundwork, but they can respect the outcomes and engage in careful applications of the findings. So too, Christians ethicists informed by a complex model of agency-structure interaction should offer an analysis that seeks realistic change, but via personalist agency—which, as CR notes, does not somehow mean we are ‘ignoring structures’. Quite the opposite: only an adequate account of the agent’s position within structures allows agency to be realized most effectively and prudently. This account is meant to be precise, and therefore perhaps more modest (i.e., less good versus evil!) than some might hope—yet at the same time, more demanding on the agent to recognize how they are called to work against structural grains in every social position that they occupy. While the tools are complex, just like the social problems we face, their use aims at an enhanced ability to name targeted actions by particular agents who have direct responsibility to act in specifiable ways to bring about social changes that are very much needed. And ultimately, with large-scale social problems, every one of us will find ourselves positioned, one way or another, with some such responsibilities! ²¹