Rodney Hide
Rodney Hide is a former minister and ACT Party leader.
We have become very good at arguing and very bad at settling anything.
Turn on the radio. Open the feed. Watch parliament. The same fights return week after week – gender, welfare, speech, the family, what children may be taught – louder each time and no closer to resolution. Each side produces facts. Each side claims reason. Each side calls the other immoral. And still nothing is decided. We treat that as a failure of manners or media or education. It is deeper than that.
In 1981 the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre published After Virtue. It is not a light book. Its thesis is simple and devastating: modern moral argument cannot be settled because the people arguing no longer share an account of what a human being is ‘for’.
MacIntyre’s opening image is a disaster. Imagine a catastrophe that wipes out science. Laboratories are smashed. Books are burned. Later, people try to rebuild ‘science’ from fragments – a few terms, a half-remembered experiment, a chart with no key. They use the words. They sound serious. But the framework that made the words mean something is gone. That, he says, is our moral life.
We still say rights, justice, freedom, fairness, harm. We inherited those words from older moral traditions – classical, biblical, Aristotelian – that assumed a human life had a purpose, a telos: an end toward which a person grows if things go well. Virtues were not lifestyle accessories. They were excellences that fitted a person for that end, the way a good knife is sharp because a knife is for cutting.
Then the modern project tried to keep the moral conclusions while discarding the metaphysics. Keep thou shalt not without created. Keep dignity without the image of God. Keep the language of the good without agreeing what the good ‘is’. Enlightenment thinkers hoped pure reason would rebuild the house. MacIntyre’s verdict is that it failed. What we have left is a rubble of incompatible first principles.
So one camp starts from individual autonomy. Another from equality of outcome. Another from utility – the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Another from traditional duty. Another from sacred victimhood. Each can argue brilliantly ‘inside’ its own frame. None can compel the others, because they do not share a measuring stick. The debate is interminable – not because people are stupid, but because they are not playing the same game.
MacIntyre called the resulting culture “emotivist”. When we say ‘this is unjust’, we often mean little more than ‘I strongly disapprove – and you should too.’ Feeling dressed up as moral law. That is why public debate is so shrill. If morality is preference with a megaphone, the loudest preference wins until a louder one arrives.
The missing piece is teleology: purpose. You cannot say whether a watch is a good watch until you know a watch is for telling the time. You cannot say whether a human life is going well until you have some account of what a human life is for. Without that, flourishing, harm, rights, and progress are floating terms. We fight over policy when we have not agreed on the creature the policy is supposed to serve.
This is not an abstract puzzle. It is why two intelligent people can look at the same classroom lesson, the same welfare rule, the same sports category, and see opposite moral realities. They are not mainly disagreeing about data. They disagree about what a man is, what a woman is, what a child is owed, and what a society is for. Until that is on the table, the rest is noise.
MacIntyre did not offer a cheap political programme. He pointed back to Aristotle and to the living traditions that still form character through practices – family, craft, worship, citizenship – where virtues are learned by doing, not by slogan. He left a hard choice on the table: Nietzsche, who faces the death of shared moral truth and reaches for will-to-power; or Aristotle (and, for many of us, the biblical story that baptised Aristotle into the West), who insists that human beings have a nature and an end.
I used to think our culture’s fights were about facts and procedure. I no longer do. The fracture is prior. We will not settle the arguments of our age until we are honest about the question beneath them: What is a human being? And what is a human being for?
Until we answer that, we will keep shouting. And we will call the shouting debate.
This article was originally published by Brash and Mitchell.
