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49 pages 1 hour read

Alasdair MacIntyre

After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1981

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Themes

Moral Philosophy Is Socially and Historically Embodied

Throughout the book, MacIntyre stresses that philosophical ideas take concrete shape in society and history, and he argues that the teaching of philosophy should take these contexts into account. In Chapter 2, he complains that in studying moral philosophers, we tend to treat them as if they were “contemporaries both of themselves and of each other,” separating them from the “cultural and social milieus in which they lived and thought” (11). For MacIntyre, this “unhistorical” approach prevents us from understanding our past and, hence, our present situation; it also falsely separates philosophy from culture, making it into a narrow intellectual niche for specialists.

One of the ideas underlying After Virtue is that we need to study the history of our ideas and assumptions—including those having to do with virtue—so that we know where we are and where we are going. MacIntyre implies that a lack of historical awareness has, in part, allowed us to arrive in our current state of moral disorder.

As a related point, MacIntyre laments that in the world of philosophical scholarship, there are too few attempts to tie together “political and moral theorizing” with “political and moral action” (61, emphasis added). Indeed, in the modern university curricula, philosophy and history are strictly separate. MacIntyre cites examples in which philosophical beliefs influenced practical affairs and politics—such as the influence of Enlightenment political philosophers on Thomas Jefferson’s statesmanship— and calls for more work in that area. MacIntyre’s interest in the relationship between philosophy, history, and society is related to his advocacy of narrative as a framework for understanding life and thought.

One of the reasons MacIntyre advocates Aristotelianism is that it emphasizes the relationship of the individual to the community; thus, for MacIntyre, it represents a fuller vision of reality than individualism. Throughout the book, MacIntyre highlights the ways in which philosophical beliefs affect society and social relations, either by creating social cohesion through the pursuit of the common good (e.g., heroic and classical society) or by isolating people in the pursuit of their individual desires (e.g., modern individualism).

Human Life Is a Story or Narrative

One of the overarching concepts of the book is that human life needs to be understood as a story with a telos or end goal. Modern individualism has tended to treat human beings as autonomous agents and tradition as a constraint from which we must be liberated. The classical Aristotelian tradition, on the contrary, assumes that human beings are born into a network of practices and traditions that connect the past to the present and the future. For Aristotle, humans are connected to the rest of the community (or society) through the pursuit of common goods.

Further, the idea of narrative permeated culture in classical society. Moral values were imparted through the use of myths and storytelling, and MacIntyre points out how human life itself can be understood as a story that interacts with the multiple “stories” of other human beings. MacIntyre claims that many types of human interaction, such as conversation, can be characterized as narratives, thus providing another smaller-scale context in which moral actions can be understood. Only by understanding human life as a cohesive narrative, MacIntyre argues, can morality make sense, because according to a narrative framework, we make deliberate moral choices that have an effect on ourselves and others.

For MacIntyre, a lack of overarching narrative is one of the key weaknesses of modern moral discourse. Due to the atomization of modern individualism, people have a tendency to think only in terms of their own goals and desires—their private and singular “narrative”—instead of measuring their actions by the effects on the common good. In divorcing the narrative of one’s own life from the broader narrative of one’s society and history, it becomes virtually impossible to create, and adhere to, the idea of an objective moral standard by which all actions can be judged. MacIntyre also believes that a lack of narrative leads to ahistoricism and a lack of context even within scholarship and teaching, further muddying our understanding of how and why certain ideas and traditions developed. 

For MacIntyre, narrative therefore provides a context for the events of our lives, binding them into a coherent whole. He argues that a return to a narrative understanding of human life and morality can restore a basis for judging actions as good or bad while also giving us a goal toward which to work. Thus, the concept of narrative is closely related to MacIntyre’s idea about morality as tied in with history and society.

Morality Is Ultimately About Character

A major part of MacIntyre’s thesis is that the shift of focus in Western philosophy away from virtue and character formation toward a rule-following and situation-based approach to ethics was a serious mistake. This is because such an approach neglects a consideration of human nature as such, substituting in its place a consideration of technical expertise and rules. In rejecting the idea of character-based morality, moral rules become a means to an end rather than ends in themselves.

By contrast, in the classical tradition, virtues are not merely means to reaching one’s telos but are very much part of the end goal itself. In Aristotle’s scheme, the goal of morality is for us to become good people and not merely to perform good actions. Put another way, the virtues are goods inherent to the practices that they accompany, not merely external or incidental. In practicing the virtues, we are cultivating the core of the self and not concentrating merely on the technicalities of moral actions.

MacIntyre posits that this character-based morality gradually lost its influence over the centuries, particularly with the rise of Protestantism and, later, the secular values of the Enlightenment. Catholic Christianity introduced the idea of sin while Protestant theology emphasized the idea of grace, suggesting that human nature was inherently “fallen” and that only the mercy of God, and not one’s own moral actions, could secure salvation. For Aristotle and other classical philosophers, man’s nature was “perfectible” through the exercise of moral excellence; for the Protestant theologians, humans were debased creatures who could only hope to gain grace through humility and abiding strictly by God’s laws. MacIntyre believes that the conception of character-centered morality was so eroded by the time of the Enlightenment that even attempts to revive it—mostly through political republicanism—failed. MacIntyre argues that this shift in moral conception has led to the prevalence of emotivism and lack of moral standards in modern ethical discourse.

MacIntyre argues that a return to a character-centric, virtue-based approach to ethics helps to solve the problem of how individual human beings can relate to other human beings and to society. By becoming educated in the virtues, we see ourselves as related to a wider social world and develop a sense of loyalty to the institutions that shaped us. Thus, MacIntyre argues for the superiority of virtue ethics in part because it synthesizes essential truths about human life, including the emphasis on selfhood and moral character, the common good, and the individual’s relationship to the community and traditions of which they are a part.

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