Practical reasoning as citizens: on the shifting conditions of public discourse

In Dependent Rational Animals (DRA), MacIntyre argues that, to inclusively pursue the common good, people need to draw from the resources of intermediate structures of society. Here the individuals become practical reasoners, with the ability to engage in public discourse and political deliberation. Two ongoing transformations within these intermediate structures suggest a reassessment of the MacIntyrean analysis: (1) Practical reasoning is “reasoning together with others, generally within some determinate set of social relationships” (DRA, p. 107), but persons increasingly belong to very diverse communities of practice among which they transfer cultural beliefs, specifications of virtue and forms of argumentation. For an individual to become a practical reasoner is thus to combine these multiple affiliations with the traditional task of finding “one’s place within a network of givers and receivers in which the achievement of one’s individual good is understood to be inseparable from the achievement of the common good” (DRA, p. 113). To recognize this inseparable connection citizens have to reflectively acknowledge that the pursuit of the common good requires the engagement with a plurality of conceptions of the good and that no single network holds all the discursive and ethical resources needed for public deliberation. (2) MacIntyre argues that “market relationships can only be sustained by being embedded in certain types of local nonmarket relationship, relationships of uncalculated giving and receiving, if they are to contribute to overall flourishing” (DRA, p. 117). What the sociology of new media observes, though, is not just the detachment but rather the reverse embedding of nonmarket relationships into market relationships. Social networks create digital environments that fuel market goals by making use of the attention and trust people nurture by sharing their personal lives and affective relations. This process has an impact on public discourse, as it transforms personal relationships into a vehicle to aggregate polarized collective identities rather than to develop forms of shared reasoning and decision-making on the common good.