MacIntyre's theory of practices, institutions, and their respective kinds of goods, has revived and enriched the ethical critique of market economies, and his view of politics as centrally concerned with common goods and human flourishing presents a major challenge to neutralist liberal theorists' attempts to exclude distinctively ethical considerations from political deliberation. However, the rejection of neutrality does not entail the rejection of liberalism tout court: questions of human flourishing may be accorded a legitimate role in political decisions-including those about economic systems -provided that the powers of the state remain subject to certain recognizably liberal constraints. Further, although neutralist liberals often defend market economies on the mistaken grounds that they alone are consistent with the principle of ethical neutrality, a non-neutralist defence of them should not be ruled out, especially if the substantive theory of goods used to evaluate them is somewhat less restrictive than MacIntyre's.
IntroductionI approach Alasdair MacIntyre's work with two related interests in mind. One is in the ethical evaluation of economic systems, and of market economies in particular; I use the term "ethical" here to refer specifically to questions about human goods and flourishing, about what makes for a good life or a life worth living. The other is in the place that such ethical judgments should have in political reasoning. Of particular relevance here is the neutralist liberal view that, since the powers of the state should not be used to selectively favour specific 'conceptions of the good', political deliberation should be restricted to questions of 'the right' (including distributive justice), eschewing questions of 'the good'.
1Neutralist liberals often claim that only market economies are consistent with the principle of neutrality, and hence with the exclusion of ethics from political reasoning (Arneson 1987). Friedrich Hayek may be seen as presenting a particularly interesting defence of this view. He argues that markets obviate the need for collective, societal-level decisions about the purposes to be served by economic activity-about, in my terms, its ethical goals or ends. This, he * This is a revised version of a paper given at the conference on 'Alasdair MacIntyre's Revolutionary Aristotelianism', organised by the
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