After Virtue Quotes

“There is no way to understand the character of the taboo rules, except as a survival from some previous more elaborate cultural background. We know also and as a consequence that any theory which makes the taboo rules … intelligible just as they are without any reference to their history is necessarily a false theory... why should we think about [the theories of] analytic moral philosophers such as Moore, Ross, Prichard, Stevenson, Hare and the rest in any different way? … Why should we think about our modern use of good, right and obligatory in any different way from that in which we think about late eighteenth-century Polynesian uses of taboo?”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

“According to Aristotle then excellence of character and intelligence cannot be separated. Here Aristotle expresses a view characteristically at odds with that dominant in the modern world. The modern view is expressed at one level in such banalities as ‘Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever’ and at another in such profundities as Kant’s distinction between the good will, the possession of which alone is both necessary and sufficient for moral worth, and what he took to be a quite distinct natural gift, that of knowing how to apply general rules to particular cases, a gift the lack of which is called stupidity. So for Kant one can be both good and stupid; but for Aristotle stupidity of a certain kind precludes goodness.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

“What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without ground for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

“We are waiting not for a Godot but for another-doubtless very different-St. Benedict.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

“Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

“The hypothesis which I wish to advance is that in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world which I described. What we possess, if this view is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely, if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, or morality”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

“There are of course times and places when what the contemporary secular world offers merits only complete rejection, the kind of rejection with which Jewish and Christian communities under the Roman Empire had to confront the demand that they worship the Emperor. These are the moments of martyrdom. But for long periods of Christian history this total either/or is not the choice with which the world confronts the church; it is not how to die as a martyr but how how to relate to the forms of daily life that the Christian has to learn.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

“Las virtudes no mantienen la misma relación con los bienes internos que con los externos: “la posesión de las virtudes, y no solo su apariencia y simulacro, es necesario para lograr los bienes internos (...) en cambio, la posesión de las virtudes muy bien puede impedirnos el logro de los bienes externos”65.
Lo anterior se presenta entonces como un desafío para quienes de verdad quieran asumir vivir honestamente, puesto que las virtudes se presentan
como un obstáculo potencial para esta cómoda ambición como lo afirma MacIntyre: “los bienes externos no son típicos objetos de deseo, sino bienes auténticos que nadie puede despreciar sin caer en cierto grado de hipocresía (...), pues el cultivo de la veracidad, la justicia y el valor, siendo el mundo como es contingente, a menudo nos impedirá ser ricos, famosos y
poderosos.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

“A central thesis then begins to emerge: man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; 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?’
We enter human society, that is, with one or more imputed characters—roles into which we have been drafted —and we have to learn what they are in order to be able to understand how others respond to us and how our responses to them are apt to be construed. It is through hearing stories about wicked step-mothers, lost chddren, good but misguided kings, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living and go into exile to live with the swine, that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are.
Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words. Hence there is no way to give us an understanding of any society, including our own, except through the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resources. Mythology, in its original sense, is at the heart of things. Vico was right and so was Joyce. And so too of course is that moral tradition from heroic society to its medieval heirs according to which the telling of stories has a key part in educating us into the virtues.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

“Imagine that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe. A series of environmental disasters are blamed by the general public on the scientists. Widespread riots occur, laboratories are burnt down, physicists are lynched, books and instruments are destroyed. Finally a Know-Nothing political movement takes power and successfully abolishes science teaching in schools and universities, imprisoning and executing the remaining scientists.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

“What this brings out is that modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means, and Bakke was an engagement whose antecedents were at Gettysburg and Shiloh.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

“We should therefore expect that, if in a particular society the pursuit of external goods were to become dominant, the concept of the virtues might suffer first attrition and then perhaps something near total effacement, although simulacra might abound.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

“The mock rationality of the debate conceals the arbitrariness of the will and power at work in its resolution. It”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

“... it is not just that moral conclusions can not be justified in the way that they once were ; but the loss of the possibility of such justification signals a correlative change in the meaning of moral idioms”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

“Do not however suppose that the conclusion to be drawn will turn out to be one of despair. Angst is an intermittently fashionable emotion and the misreading of some existentialist texts has turned despair itself into a kind of psychological nostrum. But if we are indeed in as bad a state as I take us to be, pessimism too will turn out to be one more cultural luxury that we shall have to dispense with in order to survive in these hard times.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

“the characterization of actions allegedly prior to any narrative form being imposed upon them will always turn out to be the presentation of what are plainly the disjointed parts of some possible narrative.”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

“would certainly not have admired Jesus Christ and he would have been horrified by St Paul—does”
― Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory