After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Third Edition 3rd Edition

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.

I bought this for a book study. I found this book to start out okay but it gets more and more heady, referring to other philosophers and philosophical words that I am not familiar with. If I had studied more philosophy in college I would have enjoyed it more. Took a long time to arrive, decent condition.

MacIntyre effectively diagnoses the malaise of contemporary ethical discourse, in which people can't seem to get beyond shouting at each other, and provides a historical review of how we got into this mess. His attempt to cure it by reconstructing an Aristotelian ethics of virtue is not fully satisfying, as I explain in my full review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2101088927

A brilliant work by Alisdair MacIntyre, who is one of the few legitimate Ethicists left in the field of philosophy. A must-read for anyone living in the 21st century who wants to understand where we are as a society and how we got here.

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.