After Virtue Quotes

“The good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man”
― Alasdair Macintyre, After Virtue

“Man is ... essentially a story-telling animal. That means I can only answer the question 'what am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question of 'what story or stories do I find myself a part of?”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

“I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

“Nietzsche is the moral philosopher of the present age. For I have already argued that the present age is in its presentation of itself dominantly Weberian, and I have also noticed that Nietzsche’s central thesis was presupposed by Weber’s central categories of thought. Hence Nietzsche’s prophetic irrationalism – irrationalism because Nietzsche’s problems remain unresolved and his solutions defy reason – remains immanent in the Weberian managerial forms of our culture. Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundations of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises. And consequently it is possible to predict with confidence that in the apparently quite unlikely contexts of bureaucratically managed modern societies there will periodically emerge social movements informed by just that kind of prophetic irrationalism of which Nietzsche’s thought is the ancestor. Indeed just because and insofar contemporary Marxism is Weberian in substance we can expect prophetic irrationalisms of the left as well as of the Right. So it was was with much student radicalism of the sixties.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

“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.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

“The choice between the ethical and the aesthetic is not the choice between good and evil, it is the choice whether or not to choose in terms of good and evil.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

“Totalitarianism of a certain kind, as imagined by Aldous Huxley or George Orwell, is therefore impossible. What the totalitarian project will always produce will be a kind of rigidity and inefficiency which may contribute in the long run to its defeat. We need to remember however the voices from Auschwitz and Gulag Archipelago which tell us just how long that long run is.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

“At least some of the items in a Homeric list of the aretai would clearly not be counted by most of us nowadays as virtues at all, physical strength being the most obvious example.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

“We enter upon a stage which we did not design and we find ourselves part of an action that was not of our making. Each of us being a main character in his own drama plays subordinate parts in the dramas of others, and each drama constrains the others. In my drama, perhaps, I am Hamlet or Iago or at least the swineherd who may yet become a prince, but to you I am only A Gentleman or at best Second Murderer, while you are my Polonius or my Gravedigger, but your own hero. Each of our dramas exerts constraints on each other’s, making the whole different from the parts, but still dramatic.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

“J.B. Bury once followed Pascal in suggesting that the cause of the foundation of the Roman Empire was the length of Cleopatra’s nose: had her features not been perfectly proportioned, Mark Antony would not have been entranced; had he not been entranced he would not have allied himself with Egypt against Octavian; had he not made that alliance, the battle of Actium would not have been fought—and so on.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

“The medieval world then is one in which not only is the scheme of the virtues enlarged beyond an Aristotelian perspective, but above all in which the connection between the distinctively narrative element in human life and the character of the vices comes to the forefront of consciousness and not only in biblical terms.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

“Indeed from an Aristotelian point of view a modern liberal political society can appear only as a collection of citizens of nowhere who have banded together for their common protection.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

“Сучасний моральний досвід, як наслідок, має парадоксальний характер. Бо кожного з нас навчають бачити себе автономним моральним субʼєктом; але кожен із нас також бере участь у формах практики, естетичної або бюрократичної, які залучають нас до маніпулятивних стосунків із іншими. Прагнучи захистити автономність, яку ми навчилися цінувати, ми намагаємось зробити так аби інші нами не маніпулювали; прагнучи втілити наші власні принципи та життєву позицію у практичному світі. ми не знаходимо для цього іншого шляху, крім навʼязування іншим тих самих маніпулятивних моделей стосунків, яким кожен з нас намагається чинити опір у нашому власному випадку. Непослідовність наших настанов та нашого досвіду постає з непослідовної концептуальної системи, яку ми успадкували.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

“Сучасний моральний досвід, як наслідок, має парадоксальний характер. Бо кожного з нас навчають бачити себе автономним моральним субʼєктом; але кожен із нас також бере участь у формах практики, естетичної або бюрократичної, які залучають нас до маніпулятивних стосунків із іншими. Прагнучи захистити автономність, яку ми навчилися цінувати, ми намагаємось зробити так аби інші нами не маніпулювали; прагнучи втілити наші
власні принципи та життєву позицію у практичному світі. ми не знаходимо для цього іншого шляху, крім навʼязування іншим тих самих маніпулятивних моделей стосунків, яким кожен з нас намагається чинити опір у нашому власному випадку. Непослідовність наших настанов та нашого досвіду постає з непослідовної концептуальної системи, яку ми успадкували.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

“When men and women identify what are in fact their partial and particular causes too easily and too completely with the cause of some universal principle, they usually behave worse than they would otherwise do.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

“The story of my life is always embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive my identity. I am born with a past; and to try to cut myself off from that past, in the individualist mode, is to deform my present relationships.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

“Aquinas was in some respects a better Aristotelian than Aristotle, that not only was he an excellent interpreter of Aristotle's texts, but that he had been able to extend and deepen both Aristotle's metaphysical and his moral enquiries.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

“opposes. Its commitment to a way of life structured by a free market economy is a commitment to an individualism as corrosive as that of liberalism.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

“This critique of liberalism should not be interpreted as a sign of any sympathy on my part for contemporary conservatism. That conservatism is in too many ways a mirror image of the liberalism that it professedly”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

“To treat someone else as an end [as opposed to a mean] is to offer them what I take to be good reasons for acting in one way rather than another, but to leave it to them to evaluate those reasons.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

“Os juízos morais mudaram de sentido, de significado. Dentro da tradição aristotélica, dizer que x é bom (e este x pode ser, entre outras coisas, uma pessoa, um animal, um conjunto de ideias ou uma situação em geral) é dizer que x é o tipo de coisa que alguém escolheria se quisesse um x com a finalidade com que tipicamente se quer um x. Dizer que um relógio é bom é dizer que é o tipo de relógio que alguém escolheria se quisesse um relógio para marcar o tempo com precisão (e não, digamos, para arremessá-lo contra o gato). O pressuposto, neste emprego de 'bom', é que toda sorte de itens que seja apropriado chamar de bom ou ruim - incluindo pessoas e ações -, tem, de fato, alguma finalidade ou função específica. Dizer que algo é bom, portanto, é também proferir uma declaração factual. Dizer que determinada ação é justa ou correta é dizer que um homem bom faria essa ação em tal situação; logo, esse tipo de afirmação é também factual. Dentro dessa tradição, declarações morais ou valorativas podem-se dizer verdadeiras ou falsas, exatamente como se pode dizer de outras declarações factuais. Uma vez, porém, que a noção de funções e finalidades humanas essenciais desaparece da moral, começa a parecer implausível tratar juízos morais como declarações factuais.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, Depois da virtude: um estudo sobre teoria moral

“Nietzsche is the moral philosopher of the present age. For I have already argued that the present age is in its presentation of itself dominantly Weberian; and I have also noticed that Nietzsche’s central thesis was presupposed by Weber’s central categories of thought. Hence Nietzsche’s prophetic irrationalism —irrationalism because Nietzsche’s problems remain unresolved and his solutions defy reason—remains immanent in the Weberian managerial forms of our culture.
Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundations of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises. And consequently, it is possible to predict with confidence that in the apparently quite unlikely contexts of bureaucratically managed modern societies there will periodically emerge social movements informed by just that kind of prophetic irrationalism of which Nietzsche’s thought is the ancestor. Indeed just because and insofar as contemporary Marxism is Weberian in substance we can expect prophetic irrationalisms of the Left as well as of the Right. So it was with much student radicalism of the sixties.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

“Мій розгяд чеснот складається з трьох стадій: на першій чесноти постають якостями, необхідними для досягнення благ, внутрішніх щодо людських практик; на другій вони розглядаються як якості, що сприяють благу цілого життя; і на третій пов'язуються з пошуком блага для людських істот, концепція якого може бути розроблена та збережена лише в неперервній соціальній традиції... жодну людську якість не можна розглядати як чесноту, якщо вона не задовольняє вимоги окреслені на кожній із цих трьох стадій. ("Після ченоти", с. 404-407).”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

“Central to these was and is the claim that it is only possible to understand the dominant moral culture of advanced modernity adequately from a standpoint external to that culture.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

“It is her uniting of Christian and Aristotelian themes in a determinate social context that makes Jane Austen the last great effective imaginative voice of the tradition of thought about, and practice of, the virtues which I have tried to identify. She thus turns away from the competing catalogues of the virtues of the eighteenth century and restores a teleological perspective. Her heroines seek the good through seeking their own good in marriage. The restricted households of Highbury and Mansfield Park have to serve as surrogates for the Greek city-state and the medieval kingdom.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

“The individual carries his communal roles with him as part of the definition of his self, even into his isolation.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

“That law is one and the same for all rational beings; it has nothing to do with local particularity or circumstance. The good man is a citizen of the universe; his relation to all other collectivities, to city, kingdom or empire is secondary and accidental. Stoicism thus invites us to stand against the world of physical and political circumstance at the very same time that it requires us to act in conformity with nature.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

“Ronald Dworkin has recently argued that the central doctrine of modern liberalism is the thesis that questions about the good life for man or the ends of human life are to be regarded from the public standpoint as systematically unsettlable. On these individuals are free to agree or to disagree. The rules of morality and law hence are not to be derived from or justified in terms of some more fundamental conception of the good for man.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

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― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

“The manager treats ends as given, as outside his scope; his concern is with technique, with effectiveness … The therapist also treats ends as given, as outside his scope; his concern also is with technique, with effectiveness … Neither manager nor therapist, in their roles as manager and therapist, do or are able to engage in moral debate. They … purport to restrict themselves to the realms in which rational agreement in possible—that is, … to the realm of fact, the realm of means, the realm of measurable effectiveness.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue