Historicism without Relativism? Alasdair MacIntyre’s Proposal for the Rescue of Moral Imperativeness

Abstract

Alasdair MacIntyre’s historicism has been suspected of sliding inescapably into relativism insofar as it explicitly rejects all claims to final or absolute knowledge. On his own view, however, acceptance of this fallible sort of historicism is a preliminary condition for the only sort of rational universality and moral imperativeness that we can plausibly oppose to relativism. This article appraises MacIntyre’s understanding of historicism in the twofold perspective of his epistemological account of the rationality of traditions and of his moral insistence on the open-endedness or our search for the good. In critical discussion with Onora O’Neill’s distinctively Kantian assessment of After Virtue, it concludes that MacIntyre’s historicist refutation of relativism is mainly directed against those emotivist forms of relativism which substitute manipulation to rational discussion by claiming that “others are always means, never ends,” and that it might therefore be read as providing a renewed theoretical justification for the second formula of Kant’s Categorical Imperative.