After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Second Edition

by Alasdair MacIntyre

Book Overview

When After Virtue first appeared in 1981, it was recognized as a significant and potentially controversial critique of contemporary moral philosophy. Newsweek called it "a stunning new study of ethics... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0268006113
• ISBN13: 9780268006112
• Release Date: August 1984
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

a moral thriller

I read this book conflicted. On the one hand the book contained sentences, frequent sentences, of such numbing bodilessness as "For beside rights and utility, among the central moral fictions of the age we have to place the peculiarly managerial fiction embodied in the claim to possess systematic effectiveness in controlling certain aspects of social reality." On the other hand the book was so fascinating I could scarcely put it down at points. It felt like masochism. All this to say: MacIntyre writes a moral thriller of great drama and urgency. He writes it with a tactic used by more conventional suspense novelists like Ruth Rendell: give the end at the beginning, then explain how such a bizarre and catastrophic end came to be. Our moral language assumes a universality we do not believe, he argues at the beginning. How have our moral beliefs become so ruptured from (and so much smaller than) the language we use to describe them? That rupture is the history he traces. The setting is the Western world; the characters are philosophers; the plot is the murder of Aristotle. Who killed him? Was it Hume in the Enlightenment with the candlestick? Was it Machiavelli in the Renaissance? Was it Kierkegaard the Dane with a book: Enten-Eller? Was it the Bloomsbury group with their emotivist approach to ethics? Was it, after all has been said and done, Nietzsche? And, can Aristotle (and his teleological view of morality) be brought back to life? MacIntyre's style is that of a perfectly trustworthy guide. He fends off more counter-arguments than I could have generated for him in a lifetime. "How is he going to get out of this scrape he's just identified?" I asked myself, and rested in peace that he would. He manages to tie literature, scientific results, case studies and metaphorical examples to his abstractions, rendering his work not only readable but practical. The narrative structure of the book (its movement through time) is intricate. For perhaps the first time in my (limited) exposure to philosophy, I found myself in suspense. Knowing what happened, I wanted to know, had to know, why--because it is my story, and yours, and the crux of the plot has been reached, but the end has not yet been written.

It comes down to Aristotle or Nietsche

Writing polemics in support of virtue became something of a cottage industry in the '90's. This is one of the texts that drove that trend. Fortunately, its tone is not polemical in the slightest. MacIntyre's argument is measured and well-reasoned, and he gives several useful concepts for addressing moral issues, e.g., institutional *practices* that provide internal rather than external goods, and narratives and stories as constitutive of human existence. It's an involved argument, and at least partly relies upon a reading of intellectual history for its strength. For MacIntyre, upon investigation there are only two consistent moral viewpoints: one associated with Aristotle that views morality as objectively valid and rational because it's based on a natural teleology and sees that morality exercised through the development of virtues and intricately entwined with them, another, based upon Nietsche, which sees morality only as a mask for irrational power.Lucid and well-written. Highly recommended.

a fierce response to today's philosophical status quo

This book is really two books in one. The first half in large part lays out MacIntyre's wholesale critique of contemporary moral/ethical/deontological discussion. This in my opinion is the book's greatest accomplishment; the first two chapters are a must read for all inquiring philisophical minds inasmuch as they unflatteringly lay bare the emptiness of any and all moral discussion in the post-Enlightenment West.The second half comprises MacIntyre's attempt at reconstructing a deontological system predicated on individual virtue. Special mention should be given to the chapter on life experienced as a narrative, a needed defense of the pre-Humean/Whiteheadian understanding of the human being as having an individual substance, a neccesary principle for making sense of the concepts of moral responsibility.I can't recommend this book enough, it is a gem admist the piles of pithy philisophical work coming out of the academy these days.

MacIntyre dissects 400 years of doomed moral philosophy

After Virtue is a delightful book which presents the contemporary problem of moral philosophy today. MacIntyre says that there is an interminability of moral debate today. No consensus solution to the variety of moral issues such as abortion and war will present itself because proponents of both sides of the arguments in these two issues argue from a different set of premises from a different tradition of moral philosophy. You have Thomistic ideals of the value of life and justice against Rousseauist ideals of individuality, for example, in life issues. Can any of the enlightenment moral philosophies really help us make rational, clear decisions about the morality of a particular decision? MacIntyre investigates the moral philosophies of Kant, Hume, & Kierkegard, showing how each of them miserably fail as possible moral systems. Utilitarianism, pragmatism, and emotivism are also wonderfully skewered. With what are we left? It seems as if after the failure of these systems we are left with the Nietzschean amorality of total chaotic relativism. MacIntyre understands the enigma of Nietzsche's ideas and shows how his attacks toppled the pompous, arrogant ideals of the Enlightenment. But Nietzsche's system seems impossible from a human standpoint, since, for example, we are left with the unsettling discovery that events such as the Holocaust are not really "wrong" in any objective sense. MacIntyre interjects that there is another alternative: go back to the source of the Enlightenment project. Sometime around then a bald decision was made philosophically to abandon the Neo-Aristotelian metaphysics that had supported Western thought for the previous 2000 years whether in the purest Aristotelian form or rather in highly developed Thomistic incarnations such as that which the Catholic Church held (and still does) and similar ones influences by Islamic and Jewish philosophers during the middle ages. Can this form of moral philosophy withstand criticism and ultimately rise as a viable alternative to Nietzsche? MacIntyre thinks so, and he spends a large amount of time laying the groundwork for a revived account of such a system. When he poses the question, Nietzsche or Aristotle, finally I at least think that he has made a compelling argument in favor of Aristotle (and Aquinas as some of his later work will evolve towards). Overall, I think this book is an incredible account of traditional Catholic Christian ethics and is a must for a Catholic as well as anyone else wanting to advance a conservative moral system.

A necessary read for anyone interested in ethics

In this work Alasdair MacIntyre argues that morality as we currently understand it has suffered a great disaster. As a result of the Enlightenment project's failed attempt to justify morality on its own terms, as MacIntyre argues, we are left with nothing more than shards of a once complete and coherent moral tradition. As a result the current state of morality is a form of emotivism, according to MacIntyre. MacIntyre's argument comes to a head when, in ch. 9, he claims that we must either go the way of Nietzsche's critique of morality or opt for a reworked version of Aristotle's ethics in which our moral claims can be justified.This work is, in part, resoponsible for the renewed interest in virtue ethics among contemoporary moral philosophers. Regardless of whether one ultimately affirms or denies MacIntyre's conclusions this work is necessary reading for anyone who wishes to keep informed of current debates in moral philosophy.Along these same lines I would recommend MacIntyre's other works which include Three Rival Versions and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? as well as Bernard Williams' Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, and John Rawls' Political Liberalism.