Customer Reviews

After virtue: a study in moral theory

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am rather flabbergasted that the only review on this page thus far is one comparing Alisdair MacIntyre to radical islamists. That is rather disconcerting as the author's roots, as others have already noted, come from the 1960-70's British Labour movement and from a very deep, very thought-out Marxism in the context Marxism demands to be judged on, namely, not only as a socio-economic theory, but as a robust and encompassing worldview. When MacIntyre finally decided to officially leave the Communist party, he noticed that his moral critique of Marxism seemed to lack any force, as the only two seemingly possible moral outlooks were that of a rather brass individualism ( an odd modern mixture of Kantian and Sartrean thought where each person chooses the moral law for himself ) and the tradition he was leaving, i.e. Marxism, which seemed incapable of serious self-critique. (SeeThe Macintyre Reader). The shrillness of his own protest sent him on a philosophical journey which he continues to go on to this day but we are lucky enough to have collection of his thoughts along the way. After Virtue was a tour de force when it hit the shelves roughly 20 years ago. It laid bare the utter incoherence of the use of moral language in societies of "advanced modernity", i.e., modern Europe, the former USSR, and the US. His critique of the various descendents of the Enlightenment, from utilitarians and Nietzscheans, blasted moral philosophy out of its slumber into a field that continues to grow to this day. Even today, most moral philosophers have spent most of their time attacking Macintyre's positive theses rather than critiquing his critique (a definite sign of the respect at his assessment of the use of modern moral language). To summarize it here would definitely deprive the would-be reader of the insightful journey that MacIntyre brings the reader on as he tries to look at the state of modern society. However, I will summarize the major motivations on why this book was written and why someone would read it:

1) Why are there so many types of moral disagreements in modern societies?

2) Why do these disagreements never seem to end but go on indefinitely?

3) Can any moral theory be related to actual facts or is all moral language sui generis?

Not surprisingly, MacIntyre traces most of these problems to those thinkers of the Enlightenment yet it would be a MISTAKE (as the first reviewer makes) in thinking that MacIntyre is somehow laying the blame solely on the Enlightenment for the current situation. Rather, his whole thesis is that they did the best they could in defending in what they thought was the CONTENT of morality (the culture of post-Enlightenment Europe being as it were a mix of
Christian values with an intense admiration of newly re-discovered Greco-Roman pagan texts on a range of subjects) with their own philosophical methods (See Hume's reasoning on why women should remain chaste until marriage). MacIntyre's insight is that they HAD to fail. No philosophical brilliance they could muster could save the CONTENT they wished to save (for example,"always tell your mother the truth") with their prescribed METHODS of doing philosophy (for example a la Kant, "all moral laws have the character of being assented to by all rational persons at all times in all cultures"). The Enlightenment thinkers chose an impossible task and thus failed (and moreover had to fail in such a way that their failure was relatively hidden from the thinkers themselves and their respective cultures at large). It is only with Nietzche do we have a thinker brave enough to raze the CONTENT they wished to save with the METHODS and start totally anew.

Thus, half-way through the book, MacIntyre offers the reader a stark choice: either we must choose that all moral talk (talk of right & wrong) is really an attempt to impose one's will on another person a la Nietzsche or that there is form of moral language that is not undercut by Nietzsche's own rather devastating attack on (post-)Enlightenment moral theories.

Hence begins MacIntyre's foray from critique to laying out a positive philosophical programme that leads to several books (See Whose Justice? Which Rationality? & Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Paul Carus Lectures) especially) and a refining of his ideas.

Does Nietzsche win?

That is for the reader to decide. MacIntyre has been steadily producing a body of work that tries to show that Nietzsche does not win (it starts as a whisper in this book and finally gets turned into a shout in later works). However, like all philosophy, his attempt is an argument, and it is up to the reader to decide if it is a good one.

5 stars, hands down. I really hope you decide to buy(or check-out) this important work which deserves to taken seriously for years to come. ( 20 and counting!)

MacIntyre's book is a sustained critique of "the modern project." The modern project came about in the 17th and 18th centuries. Thinkers tried to rework ethics and philosophy but in a new way: abandoning the Aristotelian and judeo-Christian ethic, they ended with a schizophrenic autonomy. Man is now seen as an autonomous agent who should further his autonomy but must live in the contradiction with other autonomous agents who also want to protect their autonomy. The modern project is a violent one at its core.

The strength of MacIntyre's work is his sustained critique of modernity and the "natural rights" tradition. He reintroduces the concept of "narrative" as an ethical tool. I will highlight the main ideas:

The Ghost of "Human Rights"
Rights have a highly specific character and are resistant to the idea of universality. The language of rights talk differs from century to century and place to place, at each moment reflecting more the demands of th community rather than the story of humanity. And when rights are attempted to be universal in scope, they reflect, not the needs of humanity, but the agenda of the powered elite. Rights talk can be rehabilitated, but only in terms of local community's narrative.

Deconstructing Aristotle
Contrary to his critics, MacIntyre is not arguing for a naive return to Aristotle. Rather, he points out the resilience of the Aristotelian tradition and then critiques its shortcomings. He uses Aristotle as a foil against Nietzsche. The importance of virtue at this point is not simply to demonstrate that Aristotle is the last word in ethics, but to show that it is impossible for consistent moderns to be virtuous. A virtue can only be understood in light of its telos (184). "The" good orders "our" goods. Modernity, accordingly, lacks such a telos--or rather has competing teloi.

Narratival Ethics
Man is a story-telling animal. We enter life with other characters and we have to learn what they are in order to understand how others respond to us (216). In ethics we learn the role we are to play. My narrative is inter-locking with the narratives of other members of the community. The telos, then, gives unity to this diversity of narratives. The telos allows me to see the whole of the narrative and the narrative gives clarity to the attempted moral vision (219).

MacIntyre's Answer
What is the good life? The good life is one spent seeking for the good life. The virtues necessary for the good life enables me to understand what the good life is (219). Life is a journey and virtue is the map.

Conclusion
MacIntyre's work is dense and often hard to read. Most of the discussions of analytic philosophy were lost on me. While I thoroughly enjoyed his critique of natural rights, I think he spent too much time on it and then conclusion could have been clearer. The section on narratival ethics was outstanding. Contrary to the blurb on the back, his afterword really doesn't deal with the integration of Aristotle and biblical theology.

This work deserves its pride of place as one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century.

I recently read back-to-back MacIntyre's After Virtue and Chesterton's Orthodoxy. Although I've been meaning to read these both for over a decade, I decided to do it now and together as I had conceived a project to read them together with Julius Evola's Revolt Against the Modern World as three views of anti-modernism: MacIntyre as a reformed modernist, Evola as a radical reactionary, and Chesterton as a defender of the status quo of the old order. This project didn't quite work out as MacIntyre and Chesterton turned out not to be quite what I thought. Although it's true that MacIntyre made the trip from Marxism to classicism and Catholicism, After Virtue is less an attempt to disabuse us of Marxism than an attempt to re-ground a form of corporatism in a pre-modern mode that would not be subject to the devastating critiques presented by advocates of modern liberal capitalism. And although it's also true that Chesterton defends orthodox Roman Catholicism, he makes no attempt to defend the status quo per se and, in fact, embraces Catholicisim as a stable ground from which he can ask for the dissolution of the traditional social structure. As against these two, Evola is quite another type as he has no interest in ethics' relationship to the distribution of goods; his is an otherworldly and inegalitarian philosophy.

In After Virtue, MacIntyre argues that our conceptions of ethics are dependent on a moral vocabulary that is inherited from the Greek Aristotelean system of virtues, but that the Greek virtues developed in a social milieu in which a proper outcome for man's life was presupposed and agreed on. Over time, says MacIntyre, both this outcome and the idea of an outcome were lost, leaving behind only a set of moral terms that were used to guide people's conduct. During the Middle Ages, the vision of the outcome was replaced conceptually by the revealed law of God, but during the Enlightenment there was an attempt to reason out morals without making reference to God and the lack of an outcome was exposed (though not recognized), resulting in the consequent history of moral philosophy in which no one can provide an adequate explanation of morality.

This history of moral philosophy constitutes the first half of After Virtue and is done in a quite convincing way. I failed to get through the first few chapters of this book over a decade ago because I got bogged down in MacIntyre's lengthy historical account of "emotivism"--the theory that all moral statements are simply expressions of desire or will. But after this account, the subsequent history of the Enlightenment project of moral philosophy is told in a convincing and engaging narrative.

The second half of the book is MacIntyre's attempt to examine the Greek system of virtues and explain it in a way that would allow it to be re-cycled for the modern world. In MacIntyre's account, there are benefits to man intrinsic in engaging in what he calls practices. An athelete training for the Olympics, for example, may find not only extrinsic benefits to training such as winning a gold medal but may find that the attempt to achieve excellence in the sport will bring its own benefits. In this story, excellence in the sport is defined as excellence in the sport per se, as opposed to winning--i.e., excellence without cheating. In the pursuit of this excellence, the athlete will discover that excellence involves not just one thing (avoiding cheating), but a whole interconnected web of virtues (i.e., the virtues are necessary to achieve excellence), such as courage and honesty. In MacIntyre's account, the benefit to the athlete consists not only in achieving excellence but in discovering and living out the virtues themselves. Thus, literally, virtue is its own reward.

MacIntyre then finds an analogy between a "practice" and the life of a person. Therefore, the achievement of excellence in a life involves discovering and living out the virtues that lead to that excellence. Here MacIntyre's argument begins to falter, for what is an excellent life? On page 225, MacIntyre admits that without a metaphysical theory, there is no unifying narrative in life. He then seems to want to say that because none of us is an abstracted individual, but all live in a community, that it is society and social participation that provides a unifying narrative to life. But this is really just begging the question since the purpose of society is to help individuals achieve excellence.

MacIntyre rounds out the book by attempting a practical application of his system--seeing how his conception of justice as a virtue compares with the conceptions of justice provided by Rawls (a liberal democratic capitalist) or Nozick (a conservative democratic capitalist). MacIntyre suggests that real people living in a real society understand justice to have a component of "desert" that is absent from the conceptions of justice given by these philosophers. Thus, although he doesn't say so explicitly, he has shown that virtue ethics can provide a ground for Marxism by recognizing that people have a belief in an instrinsic valuation of things like work (vis-a-vis desert) rather than believing that value is dictated by the market.

Despite whatever other problems there might be, the whole thing falls apart ultimately because MacIntyre uses the concept of equality as a tool to determine which parts of Aristotle's philosophy we should accept and which reject. Aristotle's conception of justice, desert, and intrinsic value accepts slavery, which MacIntyre rejects out of hand as violating equality. But from whence does equality come as a pre-ethical principle in MacIntyre's system? No, for any reasonable person, this is the end of the whole book, and Nietzsche is justified.

I think MacIntyre has gone to revise his views, but I am not really familiar with his later work.

This book is 100% recommendable, based on the analysis of current rationalistic moral philosophy. The final conclusions are thought-provoking but nothing I would take into the agora, so to speak. His invocation of St. Benedict is poetic, but how practical? The only viable communities today are those literally descended from St. Benedict or from anabaptists. Where else is one supposed to go with this?

This edition/printing is quite good and a pleasure to read.

After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre is a long sustained arguement from both philosophy and history about how moral debate today has reached its current impasse. MacIntrye argues that a rejection of Aristotelian teleology in morality dating back to the Enlightenment had philosophical vacuum when it comes to justifying ethics that has lead to the moral theories we know of so well today such as utilitarianism, Kantianism, and emotivism. These various 'isms' arose our of the Enlightenment project of justifying morality since the older Aristotelian or 'classical' tradition was abandoned. MacIntrye convincingly tears apart these other theories claiming that the Enlightenment project of justifying morality failed and even had to fail. Only a return to an Aristotelian-type tradition can provide us a solution to the impasse of our current era.

What makes MacIntrye's view plausible is his deep philosophical erudition, historical knowledge and basic common sense. I took a few philosophy classes in college and tracked with MacIntrye's references and arguments in general although I admit that he is much more well-read than I am. With that caveat aside along with my own limitation of philosophical amatuerness when it comes to the history of ideas, I judge his central argument to be correct. The lessons MacIntrye draws from history are excellent as well. Of particular note is his discussion of the Polynesian word 'taboo' and how the story of Captain Cook in the 18th century relates to discussions of morality. MacIntrye's use of what he calls 'social roles" such as the Prussian military officer, to give a stereotypical example. Some roles in our own age are those of the bureaucratic manager, and the therapist. Both of these aren't really at all concerned with ends as such in a classical sense such as Aristotle or the Christian men of letters in days of old would but just with efficiency in a mechanistic type fashion. This analysis really struck me as true just from my experience.

At the 'climax' of MacIntrye's argument a stark choice is presented in the title of chapter nine, Nietzche or Aristotle? Will we go the path of the ultra-individualist superman or back to a more classical rendition of the virtues as exemplified by Aristotle, the Christian novelist, Jane Austen, and others. Nietzche is MacIntrye's thinking was the philosopher who more than anyone else made it clear that the Englightenment project of justifying morality had failed. Nietzche forcefully argued that the moral theorizing of his recent predecessors was just a mask for their own power interests, that is their own wills. Better to be a strong individual and create your own morality on your own then to be sucked into using ultimately misleading moral language when really what stands behind that language is not a believable universalizable foundational grounding theory, but just the desires of certain individuals, which as he rightly pointed out were often quite base. Since the Aristotelian/classical tradition was simply abandoned by the Enlightenment thinkers, it has the best chance of withstanding Nietzche's critique, according to MacIntrye.

In my judgment, MacIntrye's positive argument for his own view is the weakest part of the book, primarily because he is too vague in only offering some tentative pointers without much substance. For example, MacIntrye argues that morality should be focused on internal 'practices,' narrative unity of life and be based in a social tradition. For 'practices,' think of the excellences involved in cooking good pizza, being a good tennis player, etc. This is of course very simple and so the weight of things comes upon the nnarrative unity and social tradition parts of MacIntrye's argument. He gives oblique reference to Orthodox Jews, Orthodox Christians and some Catholics as having this in the bag, so to speak. I don't have any problem with an argument that morality is only understandable in a traditional religious-type context. I just wished that MacIntrye was more open about it rather than just mentioning it almost in passing especially since this seems to be a huge component of his positive argument. Philosophically, his positive argument struck me as rather thin after he spoke so fluently about past ages and the views of other moral philosophers. Despite this weakness, his central argument was strong and his book demonstrated great historical knowledge.

This work (or, at least, this point of view) is crucial reading for anyone who finds himself in contempt of the modern usage of "ethics" and "morality"--be it the misapplication of deontology, thoughtless consequentialism, or dismissive emotivism. For anyone who has ever been moved by the concept of heroes, or of honor. For anyone who felt the word "virtue" meant something--and something grand--but could never find a hold on that.

MacIntyre begins with the hypothesis that our fragmented understanding of morality and our competing attempts at defining such a concept stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of its origins. More to the point, he presents such origins and examines their shifts through the paradigms of history.

This book is ultimately a history lesson--a look at where we've been, what we've done, where we are. This, so that the next step might be an informed one.

After Virtue is a landmark. Although some parts can be rather dry, MacIntyre is always carefully building towards his persuasive and often devastating conclusions (for example, that belief in human rights "is one with belief in witches and in unicorns" (69)). Although by no means an easy read, he writes in a personable, sometimes even dialogical, way. He also often has a funny grumpy-old-man tone, grumpy about social scientists, managers, therapists and liberals.

He writes with seeming mastery of the western tradition. However, he rarely makes citations. For example, in his discussions of Kant he usually does not even mention a text by name, let alone provide citations. When discussing other writers he will sometimes mention a particular book but then supply no or very few citations. Rather, he tends to discuss thinkers in general: the problems they were trying to address, how they failed and how they are historically situated.

In outline, his argument is that when Enlightenment thinkers freed morality from teleology (whether Aristotelian or Christian), theism and hierarchy, they undermined any rational foundation or criterion for morality. Once thinkers such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche showed that Enlightenment thinkers had themselves failed to provide a rational justification for morality, the result was our modern world of existentialism, emotivism (or moral relativism), unmoored moral fragments and competing moral islands with incommensurable criteria. MacIntyre argues, however, that morality does have a rational ground when it is based on teleology because one can then rationally say whether or not something is good or bad in relation to achieving that shared good. Thus, Nietzsche's critique of Enlightenment rationality does not extend to the Aristotelian tradition since the Enlightenment had freed itself of Aristotelianism (and for MacIntyre the Enlightenment was therefore a peculiar kind of darkness in which we still live (92)).

Roughly speaking, the book has three major parts: the first lays out the problem; the second--which for me is the most rich--lays out a history of ideas of virtue; the third develops MacIntyre's restatement of the virtue ethics stemming from Aristotle.

He speaks with an authoritative and persuasive voice, so the reader must supply his or her own sense of caution (though MacIntyre does often use the expression "if my argument is correct"). Sometimes he doesn't supply much argumentation, just what he sees to be most decisive; other times he takes pages to lay out an argument without it being too clear where he is going until he gets there.

When someone puts this much thought into an issue of this magnitude, it is worth more than its weight in gold. More than a commentary, it is an original work of philosophy both in terms of moral philosophy and the history of ideas.

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.

This book was recommended to me by a friend. I am liking it since I am not finished but I am afraid that I have been out of school so long that brain has turned to mush so I find it slow reading. His hypthesis I believe it right on the money but difficult to prove. Good for lay or academic readers.

Chapter five - Why the Enlightenment Project Failed - is the best, most persuasive chapter I have read in modern philosophy. The build up to this chapter and the content of the chapter, in itself, make the work a very rewarding read. The argument in Chapter Five is unassailable to both historical and rational argument.

After Chapter Five, however, I feel MacIntrye lost his compass and wandered Quixotically trying to substantiate Marxism and its founders against the evils of Western Capitalist thought.

The most troubling point of all this, which MacIntyre of all people should have known, is when he crossed his own rule (about the necessity of moral philosophy being argued testing both its internal logical consistency and its historical effectiveness) to try and justify his Marxist philosophy. He obdurately defends Marxism in the face of all the evil it has produced throughout history (without producing good fruit similar to Christianity that has also had its time of dark age) by saying its application has never been purely applied and therefore he feels he can throw out all the historical facts that could be used to invalidate its claims. If MacIntyre really believes this Marxist defence holds, then the philosophies of the Enlightenment have been given a similar position to retreat.

I do not think this argument holds and therefore I loved half the book (so much so that I will give it a four as a whole).

McIntyre's book offers an effete perspective on the possibility of moral justification. When all is said and done, so-called "narrative ethics" boils down to nothing more than old-fashioned cultural relativism in postmodern drag. So,...the Enlightenment was mistaken in thinking that morality can have a rational foundation? If so, then let's face the music: either morality has NO foundation at all, or whatever foundation it DOES have isn't rational. We're reduced to rot-gut ethical nihilism in either case. But that renders narrative ethics philosophically sterile, even by its own lights: it resolves no important moral dilemma, and it solves no philosophical problem.