Sociological Self-Knowledge, Critical Realism, and Christian Ethics

In his 2016 book, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, Alasdair MacIntyre spends considerable time discussing how disputes between different moral theorists and different forms of practice might be adjudicated. A crucial addition to the tradition-constituted historical narrative approach of Whose Justice? Which Rationality? is his introduction of what he calls ‘sociological self-knowledge’. The present article outlines what MacIntyre means by this and suggests that his approach here dovetails well with Christian ethicists who have advocated the use of critical realist sociology in Christian ethics. MacIntyre’s account stresses the importance of ‘a grasp of the nature of the roles and relationships in which one is involved’, a grasp helpfully conceptualized by critical realists. Daniel Finn also notes that the use of critical realism to analyze structures must be paired with a basic typology, and MacIntyre’s sociological self-knowledge, I argue, rests on precisely such a typology between two different types of moral practices. The article concludes by suggesting much more attention be paid to these ‘moral-social’ analyses when addressing apparently intractable disagreements in Christian social ethics.