- 1 - Penultimate draft – see Analyse & Kritik, Vol. 30(1), 2008 for final version Traditional Moral Knowledge and Experience of the World Benedict Smith University of Durham Abstract MacIntyre shares with others, such as John McDowell, a broad commitment in moral epistemology to the centrality of tradition and both regard forms of enculturation as conditions of moral knowledge. Although MacIntyre is critical of the thought that moral reasons are available only to those whose experience of the world is conceptually articulated, he is sympathetic to the idea that the development of subjectivity involves the capacity to appreciate external moral demands. This paper critically examines some aspects of MacIntyre’s account of how knowledge is related to tradition, and suggests ways in which the formation of moral subjectivity involves the ability to experience the world. Introduction The nature of contemporary moral subjectivity and how it is characterised by ethical theory is, for Alasdair MacIntyre, problematic. According to MacIntyre’s critique, a set of modern difficulties stands in the way of recognizing and realizing forms of life most appropriate for human beings. These difficulties are partly the result of political structures which undermine the integrity of human subjectivity, social organizations and interpersonal relations. In addition, ways of understanding the nature of moral personhood provided by dominant trends in ethical theory generally fail to help create or even conceive of a world in which human beings can flourish. MacIntyre looks to the status and role of tradition and practice as ways of explaining the difficulties and as providing the resources to overcome them. Human subjectivity, for MacIntyre, cannot be made intelligible let alone be analysed independently from embodiment in tradition. What I am interested in here is the relation between a commitment to the centrality of tradition and forms of enculturation into practices, and the possibility of these being not only consistent with but constitutively connected to experience and knowledge of the external world. This is a significant set of connections because whilst practice might be naturally construed as connected to our side of a mind/world distinction, the world at least according to powerful presuppositions of contemporary philosophy is stubbornly