Review Article -After Virtue: A Quest for Moral

Educational Theory, 1982

History of European Ideas, 1985

1981

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.

South African Journal of Philosophy, 2005

In eval u at ing the mer its and short com ings of vir tue eth ics I fo cus on some cen tral dif fer ences be tween vir tue eth ics and ri val the o ries such as deontology and util i tar i an ism. Vir tue eth ics does not pre scribe strict rules of con duct. In stead, the vir tue eth i cal ap proach can be un der stood as an in vi tation to search for stan dards, as op posed to strict rules, that ought to guide the con duct of our in di vid ual lives. This re quires a par tic u lar method. The im portance of this ap proach in pres ent times will be come clear when we in ves tigate the re la tion be tween vir tue eth ics and postmodernity. In our postmodern age moral con cepts are no lon ger per ceived as de riv ing their mean ing from larger frame works. In stead, their mean ings are perceived as be ing de rived from the con tin gen cies that de fine our par tic u lar existences. Thus on go ing grass roots moral en gage ment is re quired, and vir tue eth ics is the ap pro pri ate moral frame work for do ing this. This re sults in a broad en ing of ra tio nal ity inso far as the full rich ness of our sit u ated lives are fac tored into our ac counts of ra tio nal ity. At the same time vir tue eth ics pre vents rel a tiv ism, mainly because it does jus tice to the so cial embeddedness of hu man ac tiv i ties. In or der to il lus trate the vir tue eth i cal ap proach I will dis cuss two key con cepts in our moral vo cab u lary: re spon si bil ity and in teg rity. We will see how these ba sic con cepts can be prop erly un der stood only if one takes into con sid er ation the con tin gen cies, in her ent par a doxes and ten sions in hu man life. A young man of twenty-three is phys i cally and men tally ma ture, which is to say that he has just com menced his ac tive in volve ment in so ci ety. He is, one might say, full of dreams and ex pec ta tions which are yet to be ful filled. Much the same can be said about the pro ject started twenty-three years ago by Alisdair Mac In tyre's Af ter Vir tue. The book is an in trigu ing ex po si tion of all kinds of in tu itions and in sights, but they de mand fur ther elab o ra tion and elu ci da tion. It turned out to be the start ing point of what could be char ac ter ized as the 're vi tal iza tion or rebirth of vir tue eth ics'. This an cient tra di tion had started with Ar is totle and was the dom i nant eth i cal frame work in Chris tian Me di eval phi los o phy and mo der nity un til Imman uel Kant. In the 19 th and 20 th cen tury vir tue eth ics played a mi nor role. Worth

This work addresses a question that is simultaneously moral, strategic and ontological: by what process, by what mechanisms, is ethical virtue acquired? The delineation of these terms, 'ethics' and 'virtue', and the shifts in their meaning, will be one of my central concerns, but let us start by hearing the question as one about a specific form of excellence or authority: a robust ability to judge, to choose, to live ethically. By what mechanism is this produced? What fact or development or transformation yields it?

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 1986

Alasdair Maclntyre's A.fier Virtue' conveys good news and bad news. The bad news is that contemporary moral theory is mired in emotivism, subjectivism and relativism and the moral consensus needed to make objectively grounded value judgments is long gone. Our current situation is one of interminable moral debate, in which issues vital to our concerns can never be non-arbitrarily decided. The good news is that a solution is possible. If we move away from ethical theories which focus primarily on acts and the rightness and toward an Aristotlean theory of character and its virtues and vices. then we might be able to enjoy more objective moral judgments once again. The bad news about Maclntyre's good news is that his approach as it stands does not work. Maclntyre's own account of the virtues falls prey t o the same sort of relativism in moral judgments that he criticizes in other moral theories. I will suggest that, for Maclntyre, relativism can be avoided only by falling back onto a version of an ideal observer theory, and that Maclntyre has implicitly adopted some such view. This paper falls into three parts. I n the first section, I briefly describe Maclntyre's account of virtues. The second section shows how this account is subject to the charge of relativism. The final part describes the elements of the ideal observer view implicit in Maclntyre's work. I Emotivism is Maclntyre's all-embracing term for the bulk of twentieth century Anglo-American moral philosophy. Maclntyre almost casually dismisses contemporary attempts to provide rational foundations for moral judgments.' He also glosses over the differences in various non-cognitivist theories. There is nothing but theory of language which separates these theories. What they share is relativism: the view that for each ethical claim C, there is an apparent contradictory C', and there is no neutral objective manner by which the conflict Susan Feldman receivedher Ph. D. from the University u/Rochester in 1980; since that time she has been teaching in the Phi1osoph.v Department at Dickinson College. Her current area of research involves the problem of relativism.

2021

Abstract: This paper analyzes some influential ideas in virtue ethics. Alasdair MacIntyre, in his work After Virtue, and Elizabeth Anscombe, in his controversial essay “Modern Moral Philosophy”, brought fresh ideas into moral philosophy of their time changing views on contemporary morality. They strongly influenced moral philosophers who then followed their ideas. The two philosophers criticized contemporary moral philosophies such as emotivism, utilitarianism, deontology. Elizabeth Anscombe criticized also the use of the concepts of duty and moral obligation in the absence of God as the context God had no place. For solving the quests of modern morality, both MacIntyre and Anscombe proposed that the only solution was the returning to ancient Aristotelian virtues

Cadernos do PET Filosofia, 2014

This essay offers a phenomenological reading of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. It is intended to both illustrate the similarities between MacIntyre’s mode of argumentation in this work and the early Heidegger’s method of phenomenological destruction, and to highlight the potential fruitfulness of a deeper engagement between phenomenology and MacIntyre’s work. MacIntyre’s critique of modern moral philosophy, like Heidegger’s destruction, turned upon the groundlessness of abstract concepts separated from the experiential and social context in which they were originally at home. Drawing upon Heidegger’s phenomenology allows one to better understand MacIntyre’s critique as well as the role of his notion of a practice as a corrective to these tendencies.

2000

I owe tremendous debts to various persons and institutions without whose assistance this dissertation would not have been completed. Foremost among these is Fred Feldman, whose incisive criticism made this dissertation much better than it would otherwise have been. Fred's clarity of thought and relentless demand for excellence have improved the quality not only of the present work but of much of my philosophical writing. Any errors in the present dissertation are irrevocably mine.