Alasdair Macintyre Introduction: After Virtue and Beyond: the Search for First Principles

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Alasdair MacIntyre Introduction: After Virtue and beyond: the search for first principles Alasdair MacIntyre (born 1929 in Glasgow, Scotland) 1951: Death of Ludwig Wittgenstein 1953: Publication of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations 1953: Marxism: An Interpretation. 1955 (edited with Antony Flew): New Essays in Philosophical Theology 1958: The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis. 1958: Publication of Elizabeth (GEM) Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” 1959: Difficulties in Christian Belief. 1966 A Short History of Ethics. 1967: Secularization and Moral Change. 1969 (with Paul Ricœur): The Religious Significance of Atheism. 1970: Herbert Marcuse: An Exposition and a Polemic. 1981: After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory 1988: Whose Justice? Which Rationality? 1990: Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. The Gifford Lectures. 1990: First Principles, Final Ends, and Contemporary Philosophical Issues 1999: Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. Argument of After Virtue 1. Contemporary moral debates are interminable 2. Cause of this is the failure of the “Enlightenment project” to offer a universal secular ethic 3. Contemporary moral reasoning employs illusory notions of obligation that are ungrounded vestiges of an earlier moral vision. They function the way Taboos functioned in Polynesian culture. 4. Nietzsche understood the failure of the Enlightenment project, but his critique doesn’t hold for Aristotle’s moral vision: “Aristotle and Nietzsche represent the only two compelling alternatives in contemporary moral theory.” 5. An adequate reading of the genealogy of western ethics reveals that Aristotle’s conception of virtue had three features: (1) virtues are those qualities without which humans cannot obtain the goods internal to practices; (2) practices are "any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended" (AV 175): examples of practices are farming and fishing, the pursuit of the sciences and the arts, and the playing of games as well as politics as Aristotle understood it. (3) Virtues are also those qualities required to achieve the good which furnish individual human lives their ultimate end (telos) within the narrative structure of unified form of life, a structure that only exists by being embedded with lived social traditions. 6. The failure to maintain the social structures that gave life a narrative structure lead to the Enlightenment rejection of the virtue tradition. 7. The rejection of Aristotelian virtue, however, was not warranted. The only way to understand the current situation and to recover an adequate conception of the moral good is by returning to social traditions that support a renewed narrative structure for a unified vision of human flourishing and the virtues proper to it. .

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