After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

by Alasdair MacIntyre

Goffman’s social world is one of which a thesis that Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics considers only to reject is true: the good for man, consists in the possession of honor, honor being precisely whatever embodies and expresses the regard of others. Aristotle’s reason for rejecting this thesis is to the point. We honor others, he says, in virtue of something that they are or have done to merit the honor; honor cannot therefore be at best more than secondary good. That in virtue of which honor is assigned must be more important. But in Goffman’s social world imputations of merit are themselves part of the contrived social reality whose function is to aid or to contain some striving, role-playing will. Goffman’s is a sociology which by intention deflates the pretensions of appearance to be anything more than appearance. It is a sociology which it would be tempting to call cynical—in the modern, not the ancient sense—but for the fact that, if Goffman’s portrait of human life is a true likeness, there can be no such thing as a cynical disregard for objective merit, since there is no such thing as objective merit for the cynic to disregard.