After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

by Alasdair MacIntyre

it is only possible to understand the dominant moral culture of advanced modernity adequately from a standpoint external to that culture.

it is only from the standpoint of a very different tradition, one whose beliefs and presuppositions were articulated in their classical form by Aristotle, that we can understand both the genesis and the predicament of moral modernity.

What historical enquiry discloses is the situatedness of all enquiry, the extent to which what are taken to be the standards of truth and of rational justification in the contexts of practice vary from one time and place to another.

Liberal political societies are characteristically committed to denying any place for a determinate conception of the human good in their public discourse, let alone allowing that their common life should be grounded in such a conception. On the dominant liberal view, government is to be neutral as between rival conceptions of the human good, yet in fact what liberalism promotes is a kind of institutional order that is inimical to the construction and sustaining of the types of communal relationship required for the best kind of human life.

perhaps what we have to learn from heroic societies is twofold: first that all morality is always to some degree tied to the socially local and particular and that the aspirations of the morality of modernity to a universality freed from all particularity is an illusion; and secondly that there is no way to possess the virtues except as part of a tradition in which we inherit them and our understanding of them from a series of predecessors in which series heroic societies hold first place.

Pleonexia, a vice in the Aristotelian scheme, is now the driving force of modern productive work. The means-end relationships embodied for the most part in such work—on a production line, for example—are necessarily external to the goods which those who work seek; such work too has consequently been expelled from the realm of practices with goods internal to themselves.

what education in the virtues teaches me is that my good as a man is one and the same as the good of those others with whom I am bound up in human community. There is no way of my pursuing my good which is necessarily antagonistic to you pursuing yours because the good is neither mine peculiarly nor yours peculiarly—goods are not private property. Hence Aristotle’s definition of friendship, the fundamental form of human relationship, is in terms of shared goods.

Her novels are a moral criticism of parents and of guardians quite as much as of young romantics; for the worst parents and guardians—the silly Mrs. Bennet and the irresponsible Mr. Bennet, for example—are what the romantic young may become if they do not learn what they ought to learn on the way to being married.

By the time Jane Austen writes that unity can no longer be treated as a mere presupposition or context for a virtuous life. It has itself to be continually reaffirmed and its reaffirmation in deed rather than in word is the virtue which Jane Austen calls constancy. Constancy is crucial in at least two novels, Mansfield Park and Persuasion, in each of which it is a central virtue of the heroine.

a community which lacks practical agreement on a conception of justice must also lack the necessary basis for political community.

our pluralist culture possesses no method of weighing, no rational criterion for deciding between claims based on legitimate entitlement against claims based on need. Thus these two types of claim are indeed, as I suggested, incommensurable, and the metaphor of ‘weighing’ moral claims is not just inappropriate but misleading.

the practice of patriotism as a virtue is in advanced societies no longer possible in the way that it once was. In any society where government does not express or represent the moral community of the citizens, but is instead a set of institutional arrangements for imposing a bureaucratized unity on a society which lacks genuine moral consensus, the nature of political obligation becomes systematically unclear.

Nothing in my argument suggests, let alone implies, any good grounds for rejecting certain forms of government as necessary and legitimate; what the argument does entail is that the modern state is not such a form of government.

ever since belief in Aristotelian teleology was discredited moral philosophers have attempted to provide some alternative rational secular account of the nature and status of morality, but that all these attempts, various and variously impressive as they have been, have in fact failed, a failure perceived most clearly by Nietzsche.

just one note (962) from The Will To Power.

Nietzsche on The Will to Power: A book for thinking, nothing else: it belongs to those for whom thinking is a delight, nothing else

goods, and with them the only grounds for the authority of laws and virtues, can only be discovered by entering into those relationships which constitute communities whose central bond is a shared vision of and understanding of goods.

the claim of Marxism to a morally distinctive standpoint is undermined by Marxism’s own moral history. In all those crises in which Marxists have had to take explicit moral stances—that over Bernstein’s revisionism in German social democracy at the turn of the century or that over Khruschev’s repudiation of Stalin and the Hungarian revolt in 1956, for example—Marxists have always fallen back into relatively straightforward versions of Kantianism or utilitarianism.

Marxism is exhausted as a political tradition, a claim borne out by the almost indefinitely numerous and conflicting range of political allegiances which now carry Marxist banners—this does not at all imply that Marxism is not still one of the richest sources of ideas about modern society—but I believe that this exhaustion is shared by every other political tradition within our culture.

what Kant presented as the universal and necessary principles of the human mind turned out in fact to be principles specific to particular times, places and stages of human activity and enquiry.

the writing of this kind of philosophical history can never be brought to completion. The possibility has always to be left open that in any particular field, whether the natural sciences or morality-and-moral-philosophy, or the theory of theory, some new challenge to the established best theory so far will appear and will displace it. Hence this kind of historicism, unlike Hegel’s, involves a form of fallibilism; it is a kind of historicism which excludes all claims to absolute knowledge.

it is the central thesis of After Virtue that the Aristotelian moral tradition is the best example we possess of a tradition whose adherents are rationally entitled to a high measure of confidence in its epistemological and moral resources.