After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

by Alasdair MacIntyre

First Aristotle takes it that the possibility of achieving the human good, eudaimonia, can be frustrated by external misfortune. The virtues, he grants, will enable one to a large degree to cope with adversity, but great misfortunes such as Priam’s exclude one from eudaimonia—as do ugliness, low birth and childlessness. What matters in the medieval perspective is not only the belief that no human being is excluded from the human good by such characteristics, but also the belief that no evil whatsoever that can happen to us need exclude us either, if we do not become its accomplice. Secondly the medieval vision is historical in a way that Aristotle’s could not be. It situates our aiming at the good not just in specific contexts—Aristotle situates that aiming within the polis—but in contexts which themselves have a history. To move towards the good is to move in time and that movement may itself involve new understandings of what it is to move towards the good. Modern historians of the middle ages often emphasize the weakness and inadequacy of medieval historiography; and the narratives which the greatest writers use to describe that journey which they take to be man’s life are fictional and allegorical. But that is in part because medieval thinkers took the basic historical scheme of the Bible to be one within which they could rest assured. They did indeed lack a conception of history as invoking a continuous discovery and rediscovery of what history is; but they did not th...