After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

by Alasdair MacIntyre

What I want to argue is threefold: first, that the incompatibility of Rawls’s and Nozick’s accounts does up to a point genuinely mirror the incompatibility of A’s position with B’s, and that to this extent at least Rawls and Nozick successfully articulate at the level of moral philosophy the disagreement between such ordinary non-philosophical citizens as A and B; but that Rawls and Nozick also reproduce the very same type of incompatibility and incommensurability at the level of philosophical argument that made A’s and B’s debate unsettlable at the level of social conflict; and secondly, that there is nonetheless an element in the position of both A and B which neither Rawls’s account nor Nozick’s captures, an element which survives from that older classical tradition in which the virtues were central. When we reflect on both these points, a third emerges: namely, that in their conjunction we have an important clue to the social presuppositions which Rawls and Nozick to some degree share.