Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Part 3)

Preceding the two modern positions of encyclopedia and genelogy, and continuing to exist alongside them, is an earlier understanding and framework for ethical living, one that explains the failure of the other two. This understanding of the moral life, MacIntyre calls "tradition." By this he means something other than a calcified resistance to change. Tradition is a living, growing pursuit of the good.

Like a journeyman in a guild or a novice in a monastic order (though one could equally think about learning to play a sport or a musical instrument), the seeker after truth joins an established tradition of inquiry. The seeker first learns the language, rules, and debates of the community. This often takes the form of sacred texts or authorities. Every moral/aesthetic community has a specific goal or end (telos) that it seeks to achieve, e.g., the good life, the virtuous mean, the beautiful piece of art, the salvation of the soul. Within that tradition, its members tell each other the stories of their lives by relating them to the language and expectations of the community.

Members hold each other accountable for their stories. As members grow in the tradition, they earn the right (so to speak) to help further define and relate the telos of the community. For example, each musician helps further nuance what beauty is, discovering ever new applications, but this right to be "original" is only earned by a training and a basis in the origins of the craft:

In a community which shares this conception of accountability in enquiry, education is first of all an initiation into the practices . . . a reappropriation by each individual of the history of formation and transformations of belief through those practices, so that the history of thought and practice is reenacted and the novice learns from that reenactment not only what the best theses, arguments, and doctrines to emerge so far have been, but also how to rescrutinize them so that they become genuinely his or hers and how to extend them further in ways . . . through which accountability is realized. (201)

A better definition of education I can hardly offer.