Recommended Reading, Part I: Moral Philosophy

A Post-Physicalist Physiocratic Curriculum

In “Why Has Our World Gone So Crazy?” I argued that “like every prior civilization, transnational progressivism is wrong about virtually everything. Actually, it’s worse than that. It’s even more wrong than some prior civilizations.” I backed up the claim with a list of categories where I thought the contemporary consensus had, indeed, gone very wrong. For each category, I offered a very short list of books that had been formative or influential on my view.

Ever since then, a number of readers have emailed me to ask for a longer list of recommended reading — one went so far as to ask for “a post-physicalist physiocratic curriculum.”

Over the next few weeks, I will attempt to provide such a curriculum. As with my prior recommendations, the curriculum or reading list or whatnot will be divided into topical categories. Within each category, the books will be intended to serve as a framework, not a smorgasbord. That is, each category is meant to be read in toto, and no single book in each category should be taken as definitive. The inclusion of a particular book does not mean I endorse all, or even any, aspects of the writer’s conclusions; some books raise important questions, but answer them incorrectly; later books in the reading list provide the answers I hold.

As might be expected from a person with as many.. idiosyncratic… views as I hold, the books I recommend will often fall outside of the contemporary canon. Few will be primary sources; most of them are what I would call “books about other books” — that is, books written to summarize a body of knowledge or to offer a reaction to the perceived failures of such a body.

The physiocratic curriculum begins with moral philosophy. Why? Because I began my ascent of the Tree of Woe with moral philosophy - the moral philosophy of Ayn Rand.

Moral Philosophy

Given that most of you have probably already read Atlas Shrugged, it is Ayn Rand’s Philosophy: Who Needs It which will serve as our starting point. There’s no need to read the whole book - just read the titular essay, which Rand delivered as a speech to the cadets at the United States Military Academy. In it, Rand explains the functional nature of moral philosophy as the basis for life surviving and flourishing.

From there, we proceed to the work of the Neo-Aristotelian philosopher Alasdair Macintyre. While Ayn Rand was a self-proclaimed “radical for capitalism” and a strict individualist, Macintyre is a Catholic communitarian. And yet they are mutually supportive.

We begin our dive into Macintyre’s thought with his seminal work A Short History of Ethics. In this short book, Macintyre ably demonstrates the difference between the classical and modern conceptions of ethics - namely, “what am I to do, to live a good life?” versus “what ought I do, to act rightly?” From this we come to recognize that Rand’s philosophy is not just influenced by Aristotle but is in fact Aristotelian.

Next, we proceed to After Virtue, in which Macintyre shows why the modern conception of ethics is utterly broken - it put ethics on a pathway to nihilism from which it has never recovered. Expanding on his earlier work, Macintyre persuasively demonstrates that the only choices available are some variant of either Aristotle (virtue ethics) or Nietzsche (nihilism).

In the second half of After Virtue, Macintyre explains that while he agrees with Aristotle’s meta-ethics, he disagrees with his actual ethics, which were rooted in Aristotle’s teleological biology of the human being as “a rational and social animal.” Rejecting biological Aristotelian, Macintyre attempts to construct an alternative solution to the problem based on philosophical practice and discourse. Unfortunately, this effort fails.

Proceeding onto our next book, Dependent Rational Animals, we find that Macintyre has rejected his early solution and instead has developed his own biological Aristotelianism based on man as a “dependent and rational animal.”

This completes our survey of Macintyre’s work. We now turn to Viable Values by Tara Smith and The Ideas of Ayn Rand by Ronald E. Merrill. Smith and Merrill are both writing within Ayn Rand’s Objectivist framework and are generally supportive of Rand’s philosophy (though they are not “Orthodox Objectivists” of the sort found at the Ayn Rand Institute). In these two books, we find another set of arguments that demolishes the modern ethical framework and another call for us to return to recognizably Aristotelian ethics.

We are now able to make a mature comparison of Macintyre’s ethics with Rand’s ethics, and see the difference is largely one of emphasis: Macintyre emphasizes the social and dependent nature of man, while Rand emphasizes the rational and aspirational nature of man.

We now can understand why Rand’s philosophy made no real place for philanthropy, civic duty, family, or childbirth - an Objectivist is an Aristotelian who rejects Aristotle’s dictate that “the man who is content to live alone is either a beast or a god.”

We can also understand why Macintyre’s philosophy leads to communitarian and distributist outcomes. Macintyre’s emphasis is man’s dependence on society, and this leads him to diminish man’s need for personal freedom and agency.

The task before us, then, becomes to re-unite the rational and the social nature of man, restoring the original Aristotelian balance. How might we do that?

Seeking answers, we first turn to Natural Goodness, by Philippa Foot. Foot argues that morality is contingent upon nature. She offers up the example of a “good” wolf, who assists his pack in hunting prey and rearing kin, versus a “bad” wolf, who refuses to aid his pack and scavenges food from the pack hunters. If Foot is right, then we might better understand human morality if we understand human social organization - how do we balance “lone wolf” and “pack”?

To solve this riddle, we proceed to Frank K. Salter’s highly controversial book On Genetic Interests. Salter shows how selfishness, ethnocentrism, and humanism can be integrated into a unified moral system that supports our intuitive human understanding of how we ought to relate to others. Salter’s evolutionary approach to morality seems to me to be implicitly compatible with Aristotelianism.

Such is the framework which led me to write my essay The Errors of Ayn Rand as well as my series The Dietary Theory of Morality, Part I and Part II. That series ultimately concludes that morality has both an objective and subjective element. As a result, a large number of traditional moral systems, all of which share the same core objective element but not the same subjective aspects, can be rationally grounded on the same Aristotelian meta-ethical foundations. That in turn permits a wide range of choices for different nations, cultures, and societies, while avoiding the extremes of dogmatism, nihilism, and relativism.

Supplemental Reading

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics is the primary source for Aristotle’s moral thought.

• Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged was written as a narrative illustration of Rand’s philosophy and its implications for the world.

• Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual and The Virtue of Selfishness are companions to Philosophy: Who Needs It and expound on a number of moral issues.

• John M. Dillon, The Middle Platonists is valuable for showing the holistic nature of classical thought - Middle Platonism under Plutarch reconciles much of Aristotelian, Platonist, and Stoic ethics. This affirmed Macintyre’s argument in his Short History.

• Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals offers an alternative lens to the history of ethics that serves as a good counterpoint to Macintyre’s Short History, focusing on the evolution from “master” to “slave” morality.

• Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power is the endpoint of Nietzschean nihilism.

• Plutarch, Moralia is one of the most important primary sources for Dillon’s book. Plutarch shows up in some later physiocratic thought.