“The Big Chill” is a 1983 American movie that tells the story of seven former university activists reunited after 12 years for the funeral of one of their group who committed suicide. Nominated for the Academy Awards’ Best Picture, “The Big Chill” finds the former idealists now self-absorbed, their dreams of changing the world severely compromised.

One has become a drug dealer, another who became a lawyer to stand up for the oppressed now calls her clients “scum” and one woman volunteers her husband to father a child with the lawyer who wants a baby but no commitments. Several of the bunch are apparently wealthy.

I know people who were activists in that era, and their lives are much less self-absorbed than the characters in the movie. They remained faithful to their earlier orientation despite some dubious commitments. (One became an abortionist.) Nevertheless, “The Big Chill” pierces the superficiality of lives lived without moral roots.

Advertisement

The movie also reflects the analysis of the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre whose 1981 book After Virtue nurtured the revival of classical virtue ethics. Virtue ethics, which originated in the teachings of Aristotle, offers an alternative to modern ethical theories which hold that all moral judgments are matters of personal preference. MacIntyre calls this type of theory emotivism.

MacIntyre died May 21 at the age of 96, so this is an appropriate time to recall his contributions. Unfortunately, American media – the country in which he did most of his teaching – paid no attention to the philosopher’s passing despite his mammoth reputation and influence. MacIntyre was a Marxist who once taught a university class intended to refute the moral theory of St. Thomas Aquinas. By the time the semester was over, he had been converted to Thomism and eventually to the Catholic Church.

He was one of the rare Marxists who realized that a meaningful social critique requires a set of moral norms rooted in universal values. Moreover, those norms and values make demands on you as well as on society.

Advertisement

For MacIntyre, the problem with modern ethical theories, rooted in the 17th century Enlightenment, is that they do not ask about the meaning of life or what it means to be a human person. Instead, they search for a rational basis for moral rules and come up empty. Such philosophers wanted abstract theory when they should have been reflecting on the texture of real people’s lives. That being the case, the only basis for discerning how to act is subjective emotivism.

Emotivism, he defines as “the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character.” Such a doctrine casts aside objective moral norms and, to the extent that it has permeated the culture, ushers in what MacIntyre calls “the new dark ages.”

He maintains liberal capitalist society is the source of emotivism. It creates two central forms of character. First, there is the bureaucrat who makes no decision over the goal of their activities and whose only concern is developing efficient means for realizing goals developed by others. Second is the free spirit whose free and arbitrary choices are sovereign.

Lost is the self-determining person who, while respecting objective moral norms, develops virtues in the light of an overriding purpose for their life. 

The characters in “The Big Chill” are examples of free spirits who go through life untethered to any moral purpose other than their immediate desires. They criticize each other’s actions, but those critiques are random and stem from no sense of life having a purpose. Their friend’s suicide distresses them because they don’t know why he took his life. Yet they fail to see the rudderless quality of their own lives.

Advertisement

MacIntyre was not a slavish follower of Aristotle and his aristocratic moral outlook. He pointedly observes that self-sacrificing love and humility are not on Aristotle’s list of virtues. Indeed, they are seen as vices since they undermine the quest for the honour that the virtuous man seeks for himself. (Women, slaves and peasants are incapable of virtuous living in Aristotle’s universe.)

MacIntyre retains hope amidst the eclipse of genuine morality. He sees hope coming from local communities that strive to build civility and the intellectual and moral life. Today’s society is unaware of the barbarism that is a byproduct of emotivism. It will only be transformed with the arrival of “another – doubtless very different – St. Benedict.”