After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Third Edition

MacIntyre, in the first half of After Virtue has sought to demonstrate the conceptual incommensurable inherent in contemporary moral debate despite such debate having the pretense of impersonal rational arguments. MacIntyre then sets out to demonstrate that the "impersonal rational arguments" were the vestigial organs of failed project of the Enlightenment to formulate morality apart from theology and metaphysics, including Aristotelian teleology. The result in the breakdown of the Enlightenment project, and which is epitomized in today's interminable moral arguments, is that emotivist claims regarding the nature of moral utterance has since permeated the whole enterprise--an effect that could not but be the case where teleological structures defining the human good have been thoroughly rejected. The culmination of this emotivist quagmire was certainly not the objective, pure reason that Kant sought, but rather the dismal outlook provided by Nietzsche's "interpretations of interpretations" and where the only truth to be disclosed was that "What purported to be appeals to objectivity were in fact expressions of subjective will" (AV, 113). For Nietzsche, then, (as also for MacIntyre) the Enlightenment project of founding a substantial basis for morality in reason had failed. Indeed, "all rational vindications of morality manifestly fail" and any explanations will be "in terms of the non-rational phenomena of the will" (AV, 117). The second half of MacIntyre's work, then, undertakes the task of asking whether all justifications for morality must fail, namely Aristotle's conception of the virtues. Thus, the rest of the book is the explication of the question of whether Nietzsche or Aristotle is to prevail. This explication involves an analysis of the virtues in so-called heroic society and in the literary form of the saga and epic (Chapters 10 and 11) and a subsequent philosophical turn to the virtues as described by Aristotle (Chapter 12). Key emphasis in chapter 12 is to be found in the concept of eudaimonia, the thriving or flourishing of man by and in the progress of attaining his end, where what constitutes flourishing is also what constitutes virtuous living. Christian virtues also find more than supplementary roles in providing a telos, which transcends the polis central to Aristotle. Additionally, the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity allow for the achievement of an end where in the Aristotelian schema the human good can be thwarted (174-176). MacIntyre then provides his own synthesis which is characterized in the concepts of practice and tradition in conjunction with narrative identity. These concepts form the basis for MacIntyre's presentation of and argument for virtue, and for this reader, constitute the most important aspects of this work. For this reason, a few further comments are warranted, especially regarding the function of narrative. In both chapters 10 and 11 the importance of narrative is brought to light. In the former, the importance of telling stories as the "chief means of moral education" is illustrated and in the latter the form (of narrative) itself argued as indicative of human life. In addition social structure is identified as determinative, at least in part, in the question of personal identity. A person knows who he is by knowing his place within the social structure (Homeric society, AV, 122). The point here, which comes to light is that "All questions of choice arise within the framework; the framework itself therefore cannot be chosen....There is thus the sharpest of contrasts between the emotivist self of modernity and the self of the heroic age" (AV, 126). Morality, then, is always, to some extent, tied to the local and particular; modern aspirations to universally realized moral principles are, as a consequence, an illusion. MacIntyre notes, "It is to, for and with specific individuals that I must do what I ought, and it is to these same and other individuals that I must do what I ought, and it is to these same and other individuals, members of the same local community, that I am accountable. The heroic self does not merely aspire to universality even although in retrospect we may recognize universal worth in the achievements of that self" (AV, 126). There is no objective law, no natural, divine law; this does not mean, however, that we cannot find universal worth in retrospect. Finding worth in retrospect, presupposes the narrative intelligibility of human life and is precisely what allows for both teleological structures and unpredictability in narrative plot. According to MacIntyre, narratives are both unpredictable and teleological in nature (AV, 215-216). What this connection between unpredictability and teleology does, in one sense, is nothing new. It seems rather obvious that unpredictability in narrative by no means precludes teleology in narrative. No one familiar with story-telling would deny these features or assert such a preclusion. What is its import then? Why is this important for MacIntyre? Because unpredictability, as explained earlier, is fallaciously associated with inexplicability. Furthermore, if something is unpredictable and, in principle, inexplicable, it is by definition the effect of randomness. Arbitrary effect yields unpredictability and lack of explanation, so the idea goes. If, however, things are arbitrary (that is, not moving toward some end, in which case predictability and explanation would surely play a role), they are by definition without purpose and without purposive action. If something is both non-predictable and without explanation (as corollaries of the other), a telos is also either impossible or at least unintelligible. MacIntyre aims to correct this view by illustrating that unpredictability is not synonymous with inexplicability (and thus telos) and, rather, as illustrated in everyday life and as found in the narrative format, things which are unpredictable may be retrospectively understood/explained--but these only with reference to an end, a purpose, a telos. Narrative form presupposes characters that consist in a unified whole: "Thus personal identity is just that identity presupposed by the unity of the character which the unity of a narrative requires. Without such unity there could not be subjects of who stories could be told" (AV, 218). Narrative identity does more, however, than just reflect how human life is conceived of and interpreted (as in story-telling), but provides the medium by which and in which virtue is cultivated and enacted--and this in large part due to the fact that narrative presupposes the stories of others. MacIntyre notes that "I am forever what I have been at any time for others--and I may at any time be called upon to answer for it--no matter how changed I may be now. There is no way of founding my identity--or lack of it--on the psychological continuity or discontinuity of the self" (AV, 217). Accountability to others is what allows for the prospect of continuity--or discontinuity--and, as a result, an intelligible life or one that is unintelligible. I am not only accountable, but may ask an account of others. It is not so much as I over another, but revelatory of the fact that what gives me continuity (and in the end, an end or telos) is also what gives others an end or telos and unity of character. Insomuch as that other wishes for their own life (narrative) to be intelligible, they are accountable to me (among others). To ask what is "good for me" is to ask how the unity of my narrative is best brought to completion. If unity consist in intelligibility and the good in living out unity and bring it to completion, then the good consist in maintaining an intelligible life. For MacIntyre, "The good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man, and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to understand what more and what lese the good life for man is" (AV, 219). That good, however, does not exist in a vacuum nor can it be apprehended as if from a "view from nowhere." While the human life takes on narrative order and is only intelligible in narrative form, people do not begin ab incipio but are thrust upon the stage with stories already begun. They are part of a narrative that is already ongoing. Thus, their role in the narrative plot is, to some extent, already determined by the historical and social context one finds oneself. MacIntyre places the self in such a predicament that to deny responsibility or, at the very least, relevance to historical occurrences the effects of which I am part, is to deny, in part or in whole, the historical narrative out of which that self emerges. He likens this to, though by no means exclusive to, modern American notions regarding slavery. However, such individualism is double-edged as MacIntyre says it, placing the blameless self in no less a precarious position as those descriptions offered by Sartre and Goffman, insomuch as the self can easily be detached from the social roles and histories of which it is a part (or not) (see AV, 220-221). These historical starting points, according to MacIntyre, provide the moral starting parts for the self--moral milieus whose inherent limits may be rebelled against and overcome if the self so chooses. But the self must begin from somewhere--it cannot simply become in a vacuum. It must choose what it chooses out of the history from which it emerges. Distinctions (between the good and the bad) can only occur when actual options are available. Virtues then sustain not only practices and the individual good of a person's life, but also sustain the traditions of which the practices find their historical context. Recognition of these elements, of whose story and which plotline one is a part, is essential to cultivating the virtues that will either help or hinder the narrative of that plotline.

After Virtue is one of those works which will stand the test of time as a initiator of a discourse long forgotten in the western world. The discourse concerns the nature of morality which "sustains"or fails to sustain the inner lives of the western man after the cruel shattering of all possible illusions of any kind of moral order in the universe, a world most devastatingly described by Nietzsche. Alasdair Macintyte begins the work raising some fundamental questions about the incompatibility of perspectives which frequently meet our eye in popular culture, in media debates, in popular legislations in supreme court battles, and even in ordinary life, views which are characterized by shrill and often very violent rhetoric between individuals committed to one or other of the myriad positions available for adoption in our post modern marketplace of ideas. The feature of such confrontations is not the lack of so called justifications, which are many, but in their fundamental incommensurability. Understood philosophically, Macintyre shows the underlying lack of any real basis to these arguments. Its not a surprise that they never end.The book charts an impressive history of this discourse, its origins in the Enlightenment traditions of Kant and Hume, succeeded by Locke, Mill and Bentham, to the final death knell struck by Nietzsche. Its Nietzsche who could see the absolute destruction of the moral sphere that surrounded him and pulled no punches in decrying it. But this history is too short sighted, says Macintyre. The medieval world view which the Enlightenment repudiated, was the last remaining tradition, one inherited from the ancient Greeks, and more specifically, Aristotle, which gave the world a telos, a final goal for the life of man, and thus provided a framework which could synthesize seemingly disparate points of view and philosophical positions. One could question certain premises of that framework, but not the structural foundations of it. By dismantling the whole structure, he might have gained freedom from the oppressive weight of tradition, but his freedom had no goal to which he could aspire to. He was now free in a world where he didn't know what to do. Its at this juncture of history where the enlightenment philosophers came forward to provide the free man, a telos, a morality which could justify itself on its own terms without depending on theology or tradition. Reason itself would disclose to man, his goal. the great heights of such attempts is preserved in the works of Kant and Hume. But all these attempts failed. None could create a self-sustaining world of morality that could be justified by reason alone. Each had its glaring flaws and it was left to the powers that be to impose its own version of morality, also justified by reason. As time went by, the new oppression came from reason itself as it was twisted and turned to suit various ends , a world Nietzsche describes with horrifying precision in his Genealogy of Morals. So the author asks, was Nietzsche justified in decrying the Aristotelian world ? Was that too an example of power masking itself through a system of morals ? The answer as shown in the book is no. The greek view of morality was fundamentally different from the present system of externally defining certain acts as moral. To begin with, there was no word called morality in the greek society. There were certain unacceptable behaviour but the larger conception of modern day morality was missing. The life of ancient man was structured around a community which provided a coherent frame of action and path which he was trained to walk for his whole life ending with death, the character of which would give the narrative closure to his life. His life was a unity, a self contained block of time with its peculiar struggles and victories which made sense in the larger unity of the society which was the ground for his own existence. Thus it came to be that brotherhood was the greatest ideal of the past, an ideal which gave a kind of solidity to society we have no inkling of. Selfishness was a vice and so was acquisition. A modern liberal educated in ideas of individual success and freedom would recoil in horror at the implication of such a premise. After the fall of the Greeks, Christianity incorporated much of it in its own moral frameworks, although modified by uniquely christian additions like charity or benevolence. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica provided the most famous synthesis of such a marriage of Aristotle and Christianity. In many ways. the telos or end goal of life remained the same in essence, though the outer character of it changed. It was around the 15th century when the corruptions of the Church and its institutional oppressiveness, forced a backlash from the society, ending its reign as the supreme moral preacher and ushering in the Enlightenment. So why is this history so important ? As the book shows in excellent detail, our problems can be understood as something not unique to our time, but only a later stage in a process which began hundreds of years ago. By understanding this process, we moderns can come to a enlightened understanding of why our debates never end, why we remain confused over life changing issues and what this entails for our fragmented inner lives. The world has been through its flirtations with easy glorification of despair in philosophies like Existentialism, and the great danger today is that the despair itself has stopped being a concern anymore. Art and popular culture has taken over the stage of comforting every searching soul with easy customized and feel good solutions which destroy more than they heal. Its the great accomplishment of this book which is already thirty five years old, that it came out with a hard hitting attack at the post modern celebration of fragmented morality and gave a much needed push to historical understanding of moral structures. Macintrye would go on to write two more books, Whose Justice which Rationality ? and Three versions of Moral Enquiry, completing a trilogy of moral philosophy that remains one of the great "philosophical performances" of our time as another reviewer has pointed out.

By no means an easy read, but a book which repays careful thought and study. Unusually for a modern philosopher, MacIntyre writes interestingly about ethics - how shall we live our lives? - and does so in a way that makes you feel, when you close the book, that you have learnt a number of useful things from it. In particular, he gives a clear and cogent explanation of why modern political discourse is so fragmentary and so incoherent, because most arguments begin from "incommensurable" moral notions - ie notions where there is not even any agreement between the parties on what the arguments are about. MacIntyre is not the first writer to address this issue, but he does through a careful historical argument which explains convincingly where we are, and why.

This is a great book, but large passages of several chapters are missing in the Kindle edition, hence the one-star review. Kindle users should not have to put up with this sort of thing, especially not in an e-book sold at this high price. Beware!

Macintyre holds no brief for intelligible, pellucid argument.

This is a review of the third edition of 2007. I originally read the second edition (1985) on the recommendation of one of my philosophy lecturers when I did my degree. The third edition has an additional prologue, but otherwise there are no changes; it is a reprint, page by page. I was always aware that it was an important book and so it was never thrown into a charity bag like many others. It has always sat on my shelf waiting to be re-read; and now I have had the chance with this new edition. The title of the book's opening chapter - `A Disquieting Suggestion' - immediately arouses intrigue and curiosity, especially when its first sentence asks us to "Imagine that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe."Much of the first half of the volume is given over to elaborating MacIntyre's theory that the history of philosophy took a wrong turn with what he calls the `enlightenment experiment'. It is not until the fourteenth of the book's nineteen chapters that he finally starts to build the foundations of his own case, constructed on the support of the Aristotelian tradition. He declares liberal individualism to be at odds with this tradition, hence his argument's need for diversions into matters of `fact', `predictability', and `ideology'. The book's final paragraph contains warnings about "the new dark ages which are already upon us ... This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament."It is simply not possible for me to give a full review of this book in the limited space available. My list of quotations from this book that I consider worthy of comment is much too long, and I feel I could write my own book commenting upon and refuting many of the propositions put forward. Although it is impossible to reduce the arguments in this book down to a concise soundbyte, in the prologue to this new edition he does provides some kind of summing-up by way of his critique of liberalism: (deep breath) "... the best type of human life, that in which the virtues is most adequately embodied, is lived by those engaged in constructing and sustaining forms of community directed toward the shared achievement of those common goods without which the ultimate human good cannot be achieved."MacIntyre uses big words such as `phenomenology' and `epistemological' that can be unwieldy for those new to philosophy, but do not let these put you off, for the gist of his important argument can still be readily followed. And his suggestions are not always convincing. One senses that, however interesting and controversial his argument, that there are holes, that retorts can be offered to some of his assertions. And beware the "of courses"! There are many assumptions made. Waters can be muddied. He often reveals himself as a conservative who laments the passing of `sure' values, and sometimes states the obvious - although his explorations can be highly insightful nevertheless.The postscript to the second edition is included in this third. Here he restates his position in the areas of the relationships between (i) philosophy to history; (ii) the virtues and relativism; and (iii) moral philosophy to theology. MacIntyre is here eager to state that `After Virtue' should be seen as a work in progress, rather than a statement set in stone. But that MacIntyre rightfully matters in today's debate on ethics is clear from the many references to his work that often appear in newspaper articles on subjects as diverse as social housing and bonuses paid to bankers. Whilst I might disagree with some of his arguments and some of his conclusions, there is much here worthy of support. MacIntyre's is a valuable argument in a twenty-first century world where ethics can appear to have disappeared from the mainstream. That situation is one that is dangerous to us all and MacIntyre tries with vigour and candour and surprising propositions to remedy the disaster to which such a world leads.

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