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After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Third Edition

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After Virtue is a landmark. Although some parts can be rather dry, MacIntyre is always carefully building towards his persuasive and often devastating conclusions (for example, that belief in human rights "is one with belief in witches and in unicorns" (69)). Although by no means an easy read, he writes in a personable, sometimes even dialogical, way. The book also has a certain funny-grumpy-old-man tone, grumpy about social scientists, managers, therapists and liberals.

He writes with seeming mastery of the western tradition. However, he rarely makes citations. For example, in his discussions of Kant he usually does not even mention a text by name, let alone provide citations. When discussing other writers he will sometimes mention a particular book but then supply no or very few citations. Rather, he tends to discuss thinkers in general: the problems they were trying to address, how they failed and how they are historically situated.

In outline, his argument is that when Enlightenment thinkers freed morality from teleology (whether Aristotelian or Christian), theism and hierarchy, they undermined any rational foundation or criterion for morality. Once thinkers such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche showed that Enlightenment thinkers had themselves failed to provide a rational justification for morality, the result was our modern world of existentialism, emotivism (or moral relativism), unmoored moral fragments and competing moral islands with incommensurable criteria. MacIntyre argues, however, that morality does have a rational ground when it is based on teleology because one can then rationally say whether or not something is good or bad in relation to achieving that shared good. Thus, Nietzsche's critique of Enlightenment rationality does not extend to the Aristotelian tradition since the Enlightenment had freed itself of Aristotelianism (and for MacIntyre the Enlightenment was therefore a peculiar kind of darkness in which we still live (92)).

Roughly speaking, the book has three major parts: the first lays out the problem; the second--which for me is the most rich--lays out a history of ideas of virtue; the third develops MacIntyre's restatement of the virtue ethics stemming from Aristotle.

He speaks with an authoritative and persuasive voice, so the reader must supply his or her own sense of caution (though MacIntyre does often use the expression "if my argument is correct"). Sometimes he doesn't supply much argumentation, just what he sees to be most decisive; other times he takes pages to lay out an argument without it being too clear where he is going until he gets there.

When someone puts this much thought into an issue of this magnitude, it is worth more than its weight in gold. More than a commentary, it is an original work of philosophy both in terms of moral philosophy and the history of ideas.