After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Third Edition [Paperback]

I am rather flabbergasted that the only review on this page thus far is one comparing Alisdair MacIntyre to radical islamists. That is rather disconcerting as the author's roots, as others have already noted, come from the 1960-70's British Labour movement and from a very deep, very thought-out Marxism in the context Marxism demands to be judged on, namely, not only as a socio-economic theory, but as a robust and encompassing worldview. When MacIntyre finally decided to officially leave the Communist party, he noticed that his moral critique of Marxism seemed to lack any force, as the only two seemingly possible moral outlooks were that of a rather brass individualism ( an odd modern mixture of Kantian and Sartrean thought where each person chooses the moral law for himself ) and the tradition he was leaving, i.e. Marxism, which seemed incapable of serious self-critique. (SeeThe Macintyre Reader). The shrillness of his own protest sent him on a philosophical journey which he continues to go on to this day but we are lucky enough to have collection of his thoughts along the way. After Virtue was a tour de force when it hit the shelves roughly 20 years ago. It laid bare the utter incoherence of the use of moral language in societies of "advanced modernity", i.e., modern Europe, the former USSR, and the US. His critique of the various descendents of the Enlightenment, from utilitarians and Nietzscheans, blasted moral philosophy out of its slumber into a field that continues to grow to this day. Even today, most moral philosophers have spent most of their time attacking Macintyre's positive theses rather than critiquing his critique (a definite sign of the respect at his assessment of the use of modern moral language). To summarize it here would definitely deprive the would-be reader of the insightful journey that MacIntyre brings the reader on as he tries to look at the state of modern society. However, I will summarize the major motivations on why this book was written and why someone would read it:

1) Why are there so many types of moral disagreements in modern societies?

2) Why do these disagreements never seem to end but go on indefinitely?

3) Can any moral theory be related to actual facts or is all moral language sui generis?

Not surprisingly, MacIntyre traces most of these problems to those thinkers of the Enlightenment yet it would be a MISTAKE (as the first reviewer makes) in thinking that MacIntyre is somehow laying the blame solely on the Enlightenment for the current situation. Rather, his whole thesis is that they did the best they could in defending in what they thought was the CONTENT of morality (the culture of post-Enlightenment Europe being as it were a mix of
Christian values with an intense admiration of newly re-discovered Greco-Roman pagan texts on a range of subjects) with their own philosophical methods (See Hume's reasoning on why women should remain chaste until marriage). MacIntyre's insight is that they HAD to fail. No philosophical brilliance they could muster could save the CONTENT they wished to save (for example,"always tell your mother the truth") with their prescribed METHODS of doing philosophy (for example a la Kant, "all moral laws have the character of being assented to by all rational persons at all times in all cultures"). The Enlightenment thinkers chose an impossible task and thus failed (and moreover had to fail in such a way that their failure was relatively hidden from the thinkers themselves and their respective cultures at large). It is only with Nietzche do we have a thinker brave enough to raze the CONTENT they wished to save with the METHODS and start totally anew.

Thus, half-way through the book, MacIntyre offers the reader a stark choice: either we must choose that all moral talk (talk of right & wrong) is really an attempt to impose one's will on another person a la Nietzsche or that there is form of moral language that is not undercut by Nietzsche's own rather devastating attack on (post-)Enlightenment moral theories.

Hence begins MacIntyre's foray from critique to laying out a positive philosophical programme that leads to several books (See Whose Justice? Which Rationality? & Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Paul Carus Lectures) especially) and a refining of his ideas.

Does Nietzsche win?

That is for the reader to decide. MacIntyre has been steadily producing a body of work that tries to show that Nietzsche does not win (it starts as a whisper in this book and finally gets turned into a shout in later works). However, like all philosophy, his attempt is an argument, and it is up to the reader to decide if it is a good one.

5 stars, hands down. I really hope you decide to buy(or check-out) this important work which deserves to taken seriously for years to come. ( 20 and counting!)

MacIntyre's book is a sustained critique of "the modern project." The modern project came about in the 17th and 18th centuries. Thinkers tried to rework ethics and philosophy but in a new way: abandoning the Aristotelian and judeo-Christian ethic, they ended with a schizophrenic autonomy. Man is now seen as an autonomous agent who should further his autonomy but must live in the contradiction with other autonomous agents who also want to protect their autonomy. The modern project is a violent one at its core.

The strength of MacIntyre's work is his sustained critique of modernity and the "natural rights" tradition. He reintroduces the concept of "narrative" as an ethical tool. I will highlight the main ideas:

The Ghost of "Human Rights"
Rights have a highly specific character and are resistant to the idea of universality. The language of rights talk differs from century to century and place to place, at each moment reflecting more the demands of th community rather than the story of humanity. And when rights are attempted to be universal in scope, they reflect, not the needs of humanity, but the agenda of the powered elite. Rights talk can be rehabilitated, but only in terms of local community's narrative.

Deconstructing Aristotle
Contrary to his critics, MacIntyre is not arguing for a naive return to Aristotle. Rather, he points out the resilience of the Aristotelian tradition and then critiques its shortcomings. He uses Aristotle as a foil against Nietzsche. The importance of virtue at this point is not simply to demonstrate that Aristotle is the last word in ethics, but to show that it is impossible for consistent moderns to be virtuous. A virtue can only be understood in light of its telos (184). "The" good orders "our" goods. Modernity, accordingly, lacks such a telos--or rather has competing teloi.

Narratival Ethics
Man is a story-telling animal. We enter life with other characters and we have to learn what they are in order to understand how others respond to us (216). In ethics we learn the role we are to play. My narrative is inter-locking with the narratives of other members of the community. The telos, then, gives unity to this diversity of narratives. The telos allows me to see the whole of the narrative and the narrative gives clarity to the attempted moral vision (219).

MacIntyre's Answer
What is the good life? The good life is one spent seeking for the good life. The virtues necessary for the good life enables me to understand what the good life is (219). Life is a journey and virtue is the map.

Conclusion
MacIntyre's work is dense and often hard to read. Most of the discussions of analytic philosophy were lost on me. While I thoroughly enjoyed his critique of natural rights, I think he spent too much time on it and then conclusion could have been clearer. The section on narratival ethics was outstanding. Contrary to the blurb on the back, his afterword really doesn't deal with the integration of Aristotle and biblical theology.

This work deserves its pride of place as one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century.

I recently read back-to-back MacIntyre's After Virtue and Chesterton's Orthodoxy. Although I've been meaning to read these both for over a decade, I decided to do it now and together as I had conceived a project to read them together with Julius Evola's Revolt Against the Modern World as three views of anti-modernism: MacIntyre as a reformed modernist, Evola as a radical reactionary, and Chesterton as a defender of the status quo of the old order. This project didn't quite work out as MacIntyre and Chesterton turned out not to be quite what I thought. Although it's true that MacIntyre made the trip from Marxism to classicism and Catholicism, After Virtue is less an attempt to disabuse us of Marxism than an attempt to re-ground a form of corporatism in a pre-modern mode that would not be subject to the devastating critiques presented by advocates of modern liberal capitalism. And although it's also true that Chesterton defends orthodox Roman Catholicism, he makes no attempt to defend the status quo per se and, in fact, embraces Catholicisim as a stable ground from which he can ask for the dissolution of the traditional social structure. As against these two, Evola is quite another type as he has no interest in ethics' relationship to the distribution of goods; his is an otherworldly and inegalitarian philosophy.

In After Virtue, MacIntyre argues that our conceptions of ethics are dependent on a moral vocabulary that is inherited from the Greek Aristotelean system of virtues, but that the Greek virtues developed in a social milieu in which a proper outcome for man's life was presupposed and agreed on. Over time, says MacIntyre, both this outcome and the idea of an outcome were lost, leaving behind only a set of moral terms that were used to guide people's conduct. During the Middle Ages, the vision of the outcome was replaced conceptually by the revealed law of God, but during the Enlightenment there was an attempt to reason out morals without making reference to God and the lack of an outcome was exposed (though not recognized), resulting in the consequent history of moral philosophy in which no one can provide an adequate explanation of morality.

This history of moral philosophy constitutes the first half of After Virtue and is done in a quite convincing way. I failed to get through the first few chapters of this book over a decade ago because I got bogged down in MacIntyre's lengthy historical account of "emotivism"--the theory that all moral statements are simply expressions of desire or will. But after this account, the subsequent history of the Enlightenment project of moral philosophy is told in a convincing and engaging narrative.

The second half of the book is MacIntyre's attempt to examine the Greek system of virtues and explain it in a way that would allow it to be re-cycled for the modern world. In MacIntyre's account, there are benefits to man intrinsic in engaging in what he calls practices. An athelete training for the Olympics, for example, may find not only extrinsic benefits to training such as winning a gold medal but may find that the attempt to achieve excellence in the sport will bring its own benefits. In this story, excellence in the sport is defined as excellence in the sport per se, as opposed to winning--i.e., excellence without cheating. In the pursuit of this excellence, the athlete will discover that excellence involves not just one thing (avoiding cheating), but a whole interconnected web of virtues (i.e., the virtues are necessary to achieve excellence), such as courage and honesty. In MacIntyre's account, the benefit to the athlete consists not only in achieving excellence but in discovering and living out the virtues themselves. Thus, literally, virtue is its own reward.

MacIntyre then finds an analogy between a "practice" and the life of a person. Therefore, the achievement of excellence in a life involves discovering and living out the virtues that lead to that excellence. Here MacIntyre's argument begins to falter, for what is an excellent life? On page 225, MacIntyre admits that without a metaphysical theory, there is no unifying narrative in life. He then seems to want to say that because none of us is an abstracted individual, but all live in a community, that it is society and social participation that provides a unifying narrative to life. But this is really just begging the question since the purpose of society is to help individuals achieve excellence.

MacIntyre rounds out the book by attempting a practical application of his system--seeing how his conception of justice as a virtue compares with the conceptions of justice provided by Rawls (a liberal democratic capitalist) or Nozick (a conservative democratic capitalist). MacIntyre suggests that real people living in a real society understand justice to have a component of "desert" that is absent from the conceptions of justice given by these philosophers. Thus, although he doesn't say so explicitly, he has shown that virtue ethics can provide a ground for Marxism by recognizing that people have a belief in an instrinsic valuation of things like work (vis-a-vis desert) rather than believing that value is dictated by the market.

Despite whatever other problems there might be, the whole thing falls apart ultimately because MacIntyre uses the concept of equality as a tool to determine which parts of Aristotle's philosophy we should accept and which reject. Aristotle's conception of justice, desert, and intrinsic value accepts slavery, which MacIntyre rejects out of hand as violating equality. But from whence does equality come as a pre-ethical principle in MacIntyre's system? No, for any reasonable person, this is the end of the whole book, and Nietzsche is justified.

I think MacIntyre has gone to revise his views, but I am not really familiar with his later work.

This book is 100% recommendable, based on the analysis of current rationalistic moral philosophy. The final conclusions are thought-provoking but nothing I would take into the agora, so to speak. His invocation of St. Benedict is poetic, but how practical? The only viable communities today are those literally descended from St. Benedict or from anabaptists. Where else is one supposed to go with this?

This edition/printing is quite good and a pleasure to read.

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