After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

by Alasdair MacIntyre

First Aristotle takes the telos of human life to be a certain kind of life; the telos is not something to be achieved at some future point, but in the way our whole life is constructed. It is true that the good life which is the telos culminates in the contemplation of the divine and that therefore, for Aristotle as for the medievals, the good life moves to a climax. Nonetheless, if such scholars as J.L. Ackrill are correct (pp. 16–18), Aristotle’s discussion of the place of contemplation is still situated within an account of the good life as a whole in which a variety of human excellences have to be achieved at the various relevant stages. This is why the notion of a final redemption of an almost entirely unregenerate life has no place in Aristotle’s scheme; the story of the thief on the cross is unintelligible in Aristotelian terms. And it is unintelligible precisely because charity is not a virtue for Aristotle. Secondly the notion of human life as a quest or a journey in which a variety of forms of evil are encountered and overcome requires a conception of evil of which there are at most only intimations in Aristotle’s writings. To be vicious is, on Aristotle’s view, to fail to be virtuous. All badness of character is defect, is deprivation. It is therefore very difficult in Aristotelian terms to distinguish between failure to be good on the one hand and positive evil on the other, between the character of a Henry II and that of Gilles de Retz, or between that in ever...