After Virtue
Cover of the first edition
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| Author | Alasdair MacIntyre |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Subject | Ethics |
| Published | 1981 (University of Notre Dame Press) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 7007608 |
| 170.42 | |
| LC Class | BJ |
After Virtue is a book on moral philosophy by Alasdair MacIntyre. MacIntyre provides a bleak view of the state of modern moral discourse, regarding it as failing to be rational, and failing to admit to being irrational. He claims that older forms of moral discourse were in better shape, particularly singling out Aristotle's moral philosophy as an exemplar. After Virtue is among the most important texts in the recent revival of virtue ethics.
The book was first published in 1981 and has since gone through two subsequent editions, which have added to, but not changed, the original text. The second edition, published in 1984, adds a Postscript replying to critics of the first edition; the third edition, published in 2007, contains a new Prologue entitled "After Virtue after a Quarter of a Century."
MacIntyre holds that After Virtue makes seven central claims. It begins with an allegory suggestive of the premise of the science-fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz: a world where all sciences have been dismantled quickly and completely. MacIntyre asks what the sciences would look like if they were re-assembled from the remnants of scientific knowledge that survived the catastrophe. He claims that the new sciences, though superficially similar to the old, would in fact be devoid of real scientific content, because the key suppositions and attitudes would not be present. "The hypothesis which I wish to advance," he continues, "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." Specifically, MacIntyre applies this hypothesis to advance the notion that the moral structures that emerged from the Enlightenment were philosophically doomed from the start because they were formed using the aforementioned incoherent language of morality. MacIntyre claims that this failure encompasses the work of many significant Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment moral philosophers, including Kierkegaard, Marx, Kant, and Hume. These philosophers "fail because of certain shared characteristics deriving from their highly specific historical background." That background is the Enlightenment's abandonment of Aristotelianism, and in particular the Aristotelian concept of teleology. Ancient and medieval ethics, argues MacIntyre, relied wholly on the teleological idea that human life had a proper end or character, and that human beings could not reach this natural end without preparation. Renaissance science rejected Aristotle's teleological physics as an incorrect and unnecessary account, which led Renaissance philosophy to make a similar rejection in the realm of ethics. But shorn of teleology, ethics as a body of knowledge was expurgated of its central content, and only remained as, essentially, a vocabulary list with few definitions and no context. With such an incomplete framework on which to base their moral understanding, the philosophers of the Enlightenment and their successors were doomed from the beginning.
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