Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues

by Alasdair MacIntyre

Book Overview

This work compares humans to other intelligent animals, drawing conclusions about human social life and our treatment of those whom it argues we should no longer call disabled. It shows that humans are independent but they are also dependent animals who must learn in order to stay independent.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 081269452X
• ISBN13: 9780812694529
• Release Date: May 2001
• Publisher: Open Court
• Length: 180 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

The Philosopher in Winter

Anyone who likes good philosophical writing will enjoy "Dependent Rational Animals." In it, Alasdair MacIntyre argues for a concept of human flourishing that acknowledges the virtues of acknowledged social dependence as well as those of independent practical reasoning (the normal focus of virtue theory). Parts of the book are underargued -- particularly the section on politics -- but the writing is lucid, and the philosophy is wise and compassionate. Best of all, the book opens our eyes to the obvious but often overlooked truth that any account of human good is seriously partial and deficient if it neglects the reality of dependence -- a state occupied by everyone at some point in his or her life, and by some persons for their entire lives. Mind opening. Highly recommended.

Philosophical account for the need of virtues as to animals and humans

Alasdair Macintire, well known for several renowned philosophical books, for example "After virtue". He is an authority on the issue of virtues and Aristotelian philosophy, where virtue plays an inmportant role. What is striking about this book however, is that recent research done on dolphins, chimpanzees and other intelligent nonhuman animals, has been taken notice of by the author. This includes self consciousness and rationality. He, in an excellent way, made these insights philsophically relevant In his previous works he has never made much about animal existence. Now for the first time he meaningfully incorporated new scientific insights on intelligent and rational animals in his thinking on virtues. This indeed a gain in thinking on animal (and human) existence. He does not hesitate to put his views forward. For those who are interested in philosophy and animal issues,this book will be an great asset. In the second half of the book he also addresses the issue of dependence on and the need for virtues in human social life. Amonst many other things , he explains why neither the state nor the family would be primarily normative, why virtues guide us, but are not rigid rules. While he regards emotions as as important, his wisdom namely "Sentiment , unguided by reason , becomes sentimentalism and sentimantality is a sign of moral failure" (p124)is most relevant today;This surely applies to our making sense of both human and nonhuman animal exsistence. In a time where the killing and possible extinction of whales dolphins,chimpanzess orang utangs by human ignorance, arrogance and error as well as and certain environmental problems, and where people are looking for moral answers, this book indeed tells us why humans need virtues. The book itself fulfill in a contemporary need.

Unflinching attempt to address fundamental questions

Many virtue theorists seem to think it enough to say that "qua humans" we should flourish, and that figuring out how to flourish "just is" what practical reasoning is, and hence that virtue is intrinsic to being human in about the same way that having roots is intrinsic to being a tree, and that those of us who fail to "see" that are somehow irrational in wanting some further argument. They skip blithely over the obvious fact that much reasoning that seems quite practical and wildly successful seems rather less than virtuous. MacIntyre indulges in no such self-satisfied question-begging. Whatever else is to be said for MacIntyre's "Dependent Rational Animals," he displays the virtue of engaging directly and forthrightly the hard questions that unsympathetic or unconvinced souls would pose for his position. The way he argues that we need the virtues is quite startling in originality. Generally, ethicists take as their standard the autonomous, self-sufficient reasoner--where "reason" means something like "able to give a logically defensible verbal justification," usually in terms of some sort of universal rule. MacIntyre sees this as a mistake. The question, he thinks, is how any of us ever come to be independent practical reasoners and what it means to be such. We must, he thinks, understand that "reasons to act" have little to do with our linguistic ability or capacity to display verbally a syllogism that concludes with the action in question. Rather, "reasons to act" are more concrete, pragmatic, and instrumental. Thus, we can say that intelligent animals act with reasons, despite having no language, if their actions are clearly aimed at ends, especially if it is clear that they choose their instrumental acts on the basis of perceptions of the current environment. *Human practical resoning* begins in this aspect of our animal nature--our ability to learn in practice what we need to do in order to accomplish the things we need to accomplish if we are to flourish. Note that the issue here is learning in practice, and identifying correctly through our practice what we find to be needful for our flourishing. Reason, then, is grounded in the practice of flourishing. And rather than look at "autonomous" adults, MacIntyre points out the obvious fact, usually overlooked by ethical theorists, that we are actually always dependent on each other in myriad ways. Our mutual dependency dictates that we need communities of giving and receiving various things--including education, formal and otherwise--not only to flourish but to be able to know, and reason, about flourishing. Without the virtues, the conditions for practical reasoning *at all* cannot exist.The argument, then, is that our animality and dependency dictate what constitutes both flourishing and practical reason about flourishing, and that we can demonstrate that the virtues are necessary for being independent practical reasoners who flourish. Rather, that's the strategy of the argument. The argume

Okay, so I was wrong

I take back my previous review, in which I speculated that MacIntyre had "gone soft." On second and third reading, this is just a wonderful book - a welcome return to ambitious Aristotelian naturalism in ethics. So much better than "After Virtue".

MacIntyre's project is starting to produce results.

For years the knock on MacIntyre was that his devastating critique of modernity left nothing standing, with the unintended result that the central question of _After Virtue_ ("Nietzsche or Aristotle?") ultimately cut against Aristotle._Dependent Rational Animals_ presents a positive account of practical rationality against the background of an understanding of human nature on which we are first of all animals -- and thus always vulnerable -- and often (some of us always) disabled. This leads MacIntyre to distinguish what he calls the "virtues of acknowledged dependence" from the more widely recognized "virtues of independent practical reasoners".This book, an expanded series of lectures, is quite easy to read, especially when it focuses on such lively questions as whether dolphins and chimpanzees have beliefs and intentions, or why we have obligations to those thoroughly dependent human beings who will never develop into autonomous agents.I've long thought _After Virtue_ was the best introduction to MacIntyre, but I now suspect _Dependent Rational Animals_ may be the way to go. That way, one can begin with his positive account, and locate the critique in relation to it.