Teleology, Procedure, and the Crisis of Moral Authority

 

Teleology, Procedure, and the Quiet Overconfidence of Modern Moral Theory

The appeal of procedural morality is nearly absolute in contemporary discourse. There is something deeply appealing—almost too appealing—about the idea that morality can be made safe through procedure. One specifies fair conditions, strips away bias, models rational agreement, and what emerges is supposed to carry normative authority simply by virtue of its method. It is clean, symmetrical, and reassuringly impersonal. It also quietly evades the hardest question in ethics: why any of this should bind us at all once the procedural scaffolding is removed from view.

Contemporary moral philosophy, particularly in its constructivist form (Rawls, Scanlon, and their intellectual descendants), often behaves as though procedural correctness and normative authority are synonymous. The temptation is understandable: if we cannot agree on the good, perhaps we can at least agree on the rules for generating agreement. But this shift has a cost that is rarely acknowledged directly. What we gain in procedural clarity, we lose in substantive intelligibility. My claim is straightforward: procedural constructivism does not solve the problem of moral authority so much as it relocates it, quietly assuming the very normative commitments it claims to generate. Once that assumption is exposed, the need for some substantive account of human flourishing—neo-Aristotelian in spirit if not in strict doctrine—becomes difficult to avoid.

MacIntyre’s critique in After Virtue is often acknowledged and then politely set aside, treated as a historical diagnosis with limited present relevance. This underestimates its force. His central claim is that we have lost the shared background that once made moral disagreement intelligible. Moral language survives, but the framework that gave it determinate meaning—the Aristotelian teleological schema—does not. The Enlightenment project attempted to repair this loss by replacing teleology with rational procedure. Kant, for instance, provides a sophisticated attempt to ground morality in the form of rational lawgiving rather than any substantive conception of flourishing. While Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals achieves a form of formal universality through the Categorical Imperative, it does so at the cost of content. Rational agents can determine whether a maxim is universalizable, but the procedure itself remains silent regarding what constitutes a good human life. What is striking, reading Kant, is how much weight is placed on procedure as though it could carry normativity on its own.

Constructivists like John Rawls and T.M. Scanlon attempt to refine this move by locating morality entirely within the space of rational agreement rather than metaphysical realism. Rawls’s original position is elegant: model fairness under conditions of ignorance to derive principles of justice. Scanlon’s contractualism, articulated in What We Owe to Each Other, focuses on the justificatory structure of interpersonal reasons, positing that wrongness consists in acting according to principles that others could reasonably reject. While these theories are intellectually impressive, they remain vulnerable to the bootstrapping objection: the force of "reasonableness" itself is doing a great deal of hidden normative work. If a skeptic asks why they should care about "reasonable rejectability" at all, it is not obvious that the theory has a non-circular answer available. One can refine the conditions or emphasize mutual justification, but at some point, one is simply restating the importance of the practice from within the practice itself.

At this point, a Euthyphro-style dilemma becomes difficult to avoid: Are principles binding because they emerge from ideal procedure, or is the procedure binding because it tracks some independent standard of moral truth? If the first option is correct, then normativity risks becoming self-contained and potentially arbitrary. If the second is correct, constructivism begins to depend on substantive moral commitments it was designed to avoid. Constructivists often want the force of the second option without admitting its metaphysical cost. This difficulty is compounded by Nietzschean genealogical suspicion: if one removes teleology, what remains may simply be the procedural expression of historically contingent values that have achieved dominance under the guise of neutrality. Impartiality is itself a substantive moral stance, privileging certain models of agency and expectation.

The alternative is to confront the possibility that moral reasoning cannot be fully separated from a substantive account of what counts as a life that goes well for beings like us. This is where a neo-Aristotelian perspective becomes necessary, even for those not sympathetic to classical teleology. Virtues like practical wisdom, justice, and courage are not merely optional moral enhancements; they structure the very capacity to engage in moral reasoning. Without some account of human flourishing, the notion of a "rational agent" begins to float free of any real constraints. Constructivist procedures may not eliminate teleology so much as quietly rely on it while refusing to name it.

The persistent aspiration in modern moral theory to make ethics clean, procedural, and universally accessible is understandable, but the cost of that aspiration is becoming difficult to ignore. Constructivism explains agreement better than it explains authority. If we are to resolve the crisis of moral authority, the field must confront a more fundamental question: whether a theory of rationality that systematically ignores finitude and the substantive good can still claim to be a theory of rational agents. The challenge is not to engineer ever more elaborate procedural idealizations, but to construct formal systems that take flourishing and the human condition as constitutive features of reasoning itself.

Works Cited

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics.

Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. "The Fractured Inheritance of Modernity: MacIntyre, Constructivism, and the Search for Moral Authority."

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice.

Scanlon, T.M. What We Owe to Each Other.