Tradition (MacIntyre)

In the AI Story

MacIntyre's concept of tradition is developed most fully in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988). The key claim is that there is no tradition-independent standpoint from which competing claims about justice and rationality can be adjudicated. Every conception of what is rational or just is formulated within a particular tradition, shaped by the historical arguments that constitute that tradition, and intelligible only from within the framework of assumptions the tradition provides. This is not relativism. Traditions can be evaluated, and some traditions handle the phenomena of human life more adequately than others. But the evaluation itself must be conducted from within some tradition — there is no view from nowhere.

Applied to practices, the concept of tradition specifies what it means for a practice to be alive. A practice is alive when its practitioners engage in ongoing argument about what the practice is for, what excellence within it requires, and how the practice should respond to changing conditions. Software engineering, as a practice, has such a tradition: the debates about assembly vs. high-level languages, about procedural vs. object-oriented vs. functional programming, about waterfall vs. agile, about monoliths vs. microservices — these are not merely technical debates but tradition-constitutive arguments about what good software is and what software engineering is for.

AI poses a tradition-level challenge because it restructures the conditions under which the tradition's arguments have been conducted. The debates about how to write software were debates conducted by people who wrote software. When machines write most of the software, the traditional debates may lose their point, and new debates — about what to build, about how humans and machines should collaborate, about what software engineering becomes when it is no longer primarily about code — must take their place. The tradition survives if these new debates continue; it dies if the community of practitioners fragments into those who use AI without reflection and those who refuse AI without engagement.

The preservation of a tradition is active work. It requires institutions that support the community of practitioners, educational structures that initiate new members into the tradition's arguments, and publications or forums where the arguments are conducted. The market, on its own, does not preserve traditions — it recognizes only external goods, not the internal goods that traditions cultivate. This is why the preservation of traditions in the AI moment requires deliberate institutional design and the virtuous administrator who resists the market's pressure toward efficiency at the cost of practice.

Origin

The concept is developed across MacIntyre's corpus but most systematically in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990). Earlier treatments appear in After Virtue chapter 15.

Key Ideas

Historically extended argument. A tradition is constituted by ongoing debate among practitioners about what the practice requires.

Socially embodied. A tradition exists in communities — it requires institutions and shared practices to sustain it.

No tradition-independent standpoint. All evaluation is from within some tradition; the pretense of neutrality conceals rather than transcends tradition.

Living vs. dead. A tradition is alive when the argument continues; dead when the community has stopped arguing.

Active preservation. Traditions require deliberate work by practitioners, educators, and institutions to survive disruption.

Debates & Critiques

Whether MacIntyre's commitment to tradition-dependence is compatible with rational progress or lapses into relativism. MacIntyre's own answer, in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, is that traditions can be compared by their capacity to address the phenomena that challenge them — a position sometimes called "tradition-constituted rationality."