MacIntyre's After Virtue: A Phenomenological Reading

Alasdair MacIntyre has been at the forefront of the resurging interest in virtue theory. His seminal work After Virtue provided a tremendous impulse in this direction. First published in 1981, it proposes a return to Aristotle amid the incommensurability and fragmentation of contemporary moral theory. Since After Virtue, MacIntyre has maintained his central proposals, while his candid openness to criticism has led to revisions of many aspects of his theory. The goal of this dissertation is principally to answer the following question: how does MacIntyre’s unique understanding of virtue, particularly situated within his concept of practice, both solve the problem of moral incommensurability and withstand key objections that have been leveled against it? To achieve this, the structure of this work will be divided into three parts. The first part will deal with a conceptual analysis of the term practice which is central to MacIntyre’s understanding of virtue, that is, with the problem that practice seeks to provide a response to, its key elements, and a look at its philosophical-historical sources. As the focus of this section will be primarily on MacIntyre’s early work, one will discover that After Virtue was indeed a long time in the making, offering a comprehensive solution to the problems and questions which MacIntyre has always been concerned with. The second part will seek to offer the heart of MacIntyre’s proposal of the nature of the virtues in After Virtue, following the three stages that MacIntyre lays out in defining virtue, namely, within practice, within the narrative unity of an individual life, and within a moral tradition. The final step will be analyze a few of the key critiques that have been made regarding the limitations and implications of defining virtue within practice. In light of these objections, the possibility of an adequate response and solution will also be explored. In this respect, one must keep in mind that MacIntyre has continued to develop the concept of virtue in his later works in two crucial ways. First, he explains the intimate relation between a theory of practical reasoning and a theory of the virtues in his work Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Second, he shows how to become an independent practical reasoner through virtues of acknowledged dependence which serves to unite his theory to a biological understanding of man. This is treated in his work Dependent Rational Animals, and is an important clarification to his well-known critique of Aristotle’s metaphysical biology. This itinerary, in short, is meant to lead to a greater understanding of what MacIntyre means by defining virtue in practice, how the concept practice originated, and how this theory has developed and withstood diverse objections. The final hope is to offer prospective directions that this theory can take in order to achieve greater theoretical consistency and force.

Analyse & kritik, 2008

This paper focuses on Alasdair MacIntyre's critique of the modern self, arguing that we are not as bereft of the resources to engage in rational thought about value as he makes out. I claim that MacIntyre's argument presumes that philosophy has a much greater power to shape individuals and cultures than it in fact has. In particular, he greatly exaggerates the extent to which the character of the modern self has been an effect of the philosophical views of the self that have been influential during the period, leading him to be overly pessimistic about its nature and powers. Finally, I argue that MacIntyre has provided us with no strong reason for thinking that a moral tradition structured by modern values could not be viable.

Educational Theory, 1982

Among all the works of Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue is arguably the richest of interesting points. Too often it has been interpreted just as a plain defence of the Aristotelian- Thomistic tradition in the contemporary moral debate or, in other similar words, as a recommendation in favour of virtue ethics. It will be argued that this traditional outlook to After Virtue overshadowed some very prominent features of the work, e.g. its peculiar value from an historical and historiographical standpoint and its precious analysis of the philosophical culture of the Enlightenment. The main aim of the paper is indeed providing a clear account of MacIntyre's interpretation of the Enlightenment, its culture and its moral philosophy with a particular focus upon the notion of the ʻEnlightenment Projectʼ, the features he spotted in it, and eventually evaluating this historiographical interpretation with an eye on the most recent trends developed in the historiography of the Enlightenment from historians of philosophy and historians of ideas. The point defended will be that MacIntyre's account of the Enlightenment was very close to the approach shared by historians at present, even though After Virtue was published in 1981, perhaps pioneering a new trend of enquiry in history of philosophy.

MA, University of Illinois, 2015

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze MacIntyre’s solution to the problem of modern morality; it is a critical evaluation of MacIntyre’s Aristotelianism. The thesis of the project is that MacIntyre’s Aristotelian ethics in After Virtue is conceived in such a way that it does not land in a very different place than that of his emotivist partners in the debate. Aristotle’s ethics has a metaphysical grounding in that the Unmoved Mover, as the external main factor in the world around us, is the ultimate good and aim of the whole universe and the human race. If the human good is understood only in terms of practice, narrative unity, and tradition, the backbone of Aristotle’s ethics is dismantled in such a way that it will not lead to the solution MacIntyre claims. Because of the pure actuality, in the unmoved mover, the potentiality in every human being can be realized. If this framework of thought is dismantled there is no movement or change in human morality, as Aristotle understood it. The ultimate end in human lives is happiness realized. This is reasonable only if these lives follow the function of man, if they practice virtue, and embrace contemplation which brings us closer to the gods. This upward movement of the inquiry is lost if the human end is redefined in social terms.

History of European Ideas, 1985

Journal of Religious Ethics, 2020

Over the last two decades, a growing philosophical literature has subjected virtue ethics to empirical evaluation. Drawing on results in social psychology, a number of critics have argued that virtue ethics depends upon false presuppositions about the cross-situational consistency of psychological traits. Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue has been a prime target for the situationist critics. This essay assesses the situationist critique of MacIntyre's account of virtue. It argues that MacIntyre's social teleological account of virtue is not what his situationist critics take it to be. Virtues, for MacIntyre, are not reducible to psychological traits. They are qualities of one's socially constituted character, and their intelligibility as virtues derives from their role in the narrative of one's life. Recognizing this both clarifies and complicates debates about the implication of situationist social psychology for virtue ethics. KEYWORDS virtue, character, Alasdair MacIntyre, Neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics, empirical psychology, situationism Ryan Darr is a doctoral candidate in religious studies at Yale University. He works primarily in Christian ethics, moral philosophy, and early modern ethics.

The Journal of Value Inquiry, 2009

1981