Spontaneity and Perfection: MacIntyre vs. Løgstrup

Dr Patrick Stokes (Deakin University )

Despite his considerable influence on postwar Nordic moral philosophy and theology, K.E. Løgstrup (1905-1981) has been largely ignored outside Scandinavia. One important exception has been no less a figure than Alasdair MacIntyre. In two recent papers, MacIntyre has sought to recruit Løgstrup’s account of the “ethical demand” and of phenomena such as trust and mercy – what Løgstrup calls the “sovereign expressions of life” – for his own Thomist-Aristotelian metaethical project. MacIntyre concludes that, far from offering a rival view, Løgstrup (like Levinas) supplies ‘from the inside’ accounts of moral experience that can be used to give Thomism more phenomenological heft. This claim depends upon MacIntyre’s assumption that Løgstrup largely gets his descriptions of moral phenomena like trust and mercy right, but gets the source of their normativity wrong. I argue, however, that MacIntyre underplays just how radically different Løgstrup’s ‘ontological’ ethics (which he explicitly offers as a rival to both deontic and aretaic ethics) are from his own, and that Løgstrup’s descriptions of moral experience may not be as available to MacIntyre as he believes.

Patrick Stokes is Lecturer in Philosophy at Deakin University. His research is concerned to bring Kierkegaard into dialogue with contemporary analytic philosophy, as well as to explore the temporal and perspectival aspects of the question of selfhood. He is the author of Kierkegaard’s Mirrors: Interest, Self and Moral Vision (Palgrave, 2010) and, with Adam Buben, the co-editor of Kierkegaard and Death (Indiana UP, 2011).