After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

by Alasdair MacIntyre

there seems to be a possible relationship between the history of moral discourse and the history of the academic curriculum.

nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling,

the stronger and psychologically more adroit will was prevailing.

The unrecognized philosophical power of emotivism is one clue to its cultural power.

for whom the last enemy is boredom.

Philip Rieff

In The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966) and also in To My Fellow Teachers (1975) Philip Rieff has documented with devastating insight a number of the ways in which truth has been displaced as a value and replaced by psychological effectiveness.

Anyone and everyone can thus be a moral agent, since it is in the self and not in social roles or practices that moral agency has to be located.

This democratized self which has no necessary social content and no necessary social identity can then be anything, can assume any role or take any point of view, because it is in and for itself nothing.

both see the self as entirely set over against the social world.

the peculiarly modern self, the emotivist self, in acquiring sovereignty in its own realm lost its traditional boundaries provided by a social identity and a view of human life as ordered to a given end.

politics of modern societies oscillate between a freedom which is nothing but a lack of regulation of individual behavior and forms of collectivist control designed only to limit the anarchy of self-interest.

freemasonry, which is perhaps the religion of Enlightenment

mass murder of Ypres and the Somme;

moral scheme

Its basic structure is that which Aristotle analyzed in the Nicomachean Ethics. Within that teleological scheme there is a fundamental contrast between man-as-he-happens-to-be and man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-essential-nature.

All reject any teleological view of human nature, any view of man as having an essence which defines his true end.

Contra Westminster Q 1

moral arguments within the classical, Aristotelian tradition—whether in its Greek or its medieval versions—involve at least one central functional concept, the concept of man understood as having an essential nature and an essential purpose or function;

we know that there are no self-evident truths.

except this one

one of the things that we ought to have learned from the history of moral philosophy is that the introduction of the word ‘intuition’ by a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone badly wrong with an argument. In the United Nations declaration on human rights of 1949 what has since become the normal UN practice of not giving good reasons for any assertions whatsoever is followed with great rigor.

Natural science teaches us to attend to some experiences rather than to others and only to those when they have been cast into the proper form for scientific attention.

For the behavior of the manipulated is being contrived in accordance with his intentions, reasons and purposes; intentions, reasons and purposes which he is treating, at least while he is engaged in such manipulation, as exempt from the laws which govern the behavior of the manipulated.

Any invention, any discovery, which consists essentially in the elaboration of a radically new concept cannot be predicted, for a necessary part of the prediction is the

present elaboration of the very concept whose discovery or invention was to take place only in the future. The notion of the prediction of radical conceptual innovation is itself conceptually incoherent.

omniscience excludes the making of decisions. If God knows everything that will occur, he confronts no as yet unmade decision. He has a single will

It is precisely insofar as we differ from God that unpredictability invades our lives. This way of putting the point has one particular merit: it suggests precisely what project those who seek to eliminate unpredictability from the social world or to deny it may in fact be engaging in.

everything in Texas tends to be bigger including the homicide rates.

We need to remain to some degree opaque and unpredictable, particularly when threatened by the predictive practices of others.

Want not need

The problem then is how to construct in an entirely original way, how to invent a new table of what is good and a law, a problem which arises for each individual. This problem would constitute the core of a Nietzschean moral philosophy. For it is in his relentlessly serious pursuit of the problem, not in his frivolous solutions that Nietzsche’s greatness lies, the greatness that makes him the moral philosopher if the only alternatives to Nietzsche’s moral philosophy turn out to be those formulated by the philosophers of the Enlightenment and their successors.

when modernity made its assaults on an older world its most perceptive exponents understood that it was Aristotelianism that had to be overthrown.

Thus the Iliad puts in question what neither Achilles nor Hector can put in question; the poem lay claim to a form of understanding which it denies to those whose actions it describes.

when Nietzsche projects back on to the archaic past his own nineteenth-century individualism, he reveals that what looked like an historical enquiry was actually an inventive literary construction.

whole importance of being a Nietzschean does after all lie in the triumph of being finally undeceived, being, as Nietzsche put it, truthful at last.

Human beings, like the members of all other species, have a specific nature; and that nature is such that they have certain aims and goals, such that they move by nature towards a specific telos. The good is defined in terms of their specific characteristics.

For what constitutes the good for man is a complete human life lived at its best, and the exercise of the virtues is a necessary and central part of such a life, not a mere preparatory exercise to secure such a life. We thus cannot characterize the good for man adequately without already having made reference to the virtues.

The genuinely virtuous agent however acts on the basis of a true and rational judgment.

The exercise of such judgment is not a routinizable application of rules. Hence perhaps the most obvious and astonishing absence from Aristotle’s thought for any modern reader: there is relatively little mention of rules anywhere in the Ethics.

it is a crucial part of Aristotle’s view that certain types of action are absolutely prohibited or enjoined irrespective of circumstances or consequences.

the exercise of practical intelligence requires the presence of the virtues of character; otherwise it degenerates into or remains from the outset merely a certain cunning capacity for linking means to any end rather than to those ends which are genuine goods for man.

Individuals as members of a species have a telos, but there is no history of the polis or of Greece or of mankind moving towards a telos.

Aristotle was

well aware that the kind of knowledge which he takes to be genuinely scientific, to constitute epistêmê—knowledge of essential natures grasped through universal necessary truths, logically derivable from certain first principles—cannot characteristically be had of human affairs at all.

But man without

culture is a myth. Our biological nature certainly places constraints on all cultural possibility; but man who has nothing but a biological nature is a creature of whom we know nothing. It is only man with practical intelligence—and that, as we have seen, is intelligence informed by virtues—whom we actively meet in history.

from an Aristotelian standpoint, reason cannot be the servant of the passions. For the education of the passions into conformity with pursuit of what theoretical reasoning identifies as the telos and practical reasoning as the right action

to do in each particular time and place is what ethics is about.

For it was Anderson’s insight—a Sophoclean insight—that it is through conflict and sometimes only through conflict that we learn what our ends and purposes are.

Often both forms and stories were Christianized so that the pagan warrior-king could emerge as the Christian knight, remarkably unchanged.

Contra Lewis

These are the moments of martyrdom.

The true arena of morality is that of the will and of the will alone.