The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in his important book Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry traces the devolution of the Western ethical tradition and its loss of a common vision that would ground ethical life. He argues that at its heart, the West has passed through three stages--tradition, encyclopedia, and genealogy--though each continues to exist alongside the other two.
The second position, born out of the Enlightenment, MacIntyre calls "encyclopedia" after the project of the French philosophes. For this position, truth is something that can be obtained by an objective study of the facts, either by correlating all the available data or by an appeal to common rational principles. Seekers must eliminate their preconceived notions (a' la their traditions) and pay attention to the natural and social world. Truth and morality are not obtained by appealing to a divine or eternal standard of authority but by appealing to rational criteria that can be accessed by all equally. Individuals’ reasoned judgments are the only test of reliability, so "faith, while at its best in the gospels upholding true morality, adds nothing to morality" (175).
The historic result of such an ethical position, however, was that the search for an objective order in the natural, empirical world achieved nothing like a stable worldview; its promising claims never followed through. No consensus could be attained without a final ordering end (e.g., a revelation of truth); thus, the search became essentially arbitrary.
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