MacIntyre, Alistair. After Virtue: a study in moral theory. Third Edition. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.
It seems odd that, so soon after my first post speculating as to the root cause of the shrillness and incivility of so-called civil discourse in our society, almost the next book I should light on was the third edition of Alistair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, which purports, among other things, to give an account of exactly that. Odd or not, however, it did inspire me to belatedly begin following Mortimer Adler’s advice in How to Read a Book by summarizing key points on paper, as it were. So here goes.
Prologue
AM summarizes the development in his thought since the first edition of After Virtue was published in 1981. He still holds that the Enlightenment project of providing a unified account of the justification and the content of morality, which seemd to be called for by the advance of the scientific age, has so far failed. This failure is seen in “the poverty of the arguments adduced in support of [contending parties’ moral] assertions and the characteristically shrill, and assertive and expressive mode in which they are uttered.” AM also still holds that the Aristotelian moral tradition is capable of understanding “what the predicament of moral modernity is and why the culture of moral modernity lacks the resources to proceed further with its own moral enquiries, so that sterility and frustration are bound to afflict those unable to extricate themselves from those predicaments.”
Sound familiar?
So, what has changed since the first edition?
AM believes that he now understands the Aristotelian “commitments” better than he did in 1981. In the first place, his study of Aquinas (“in some respects a better Aristotelian than Aristotle”) persuaded him that any attempt to account for human good in purely social terms, specifically, without reference to human ends, would always be inadequate. In the second place, he recognized that an account of human beings needs not only a metaphysical, but also a biological, grounding: here, he very rightly rejects Aristotle’s biology, in favor of something he has set forth in detail in his Dependent Rational Animals. I haven’t read it, so I can’t tell you what it says, and AM does not elaborate here, but the book goes on the Reading List.
AM’s thought also developed as a result of criticism of the first edition by “those who were in radical disagreement with it.”
The first criticism he addresses deals with his supposed idealization of the past, specifically that of the Athenian polis. His response is an argument based on, first, the need for each age to learn from some aspects of the past (see C.S. Lewis’s statement of the same theme in Why Read Old Books); second, the inadequacy of relativism; third, the need for a moral philosopher to cultivate a philosophical imagination that would enable him to “think as if one were a convinced adherent of [a] rival tradition; fourth, the possibility of understanding through use of such moral imagination how one particular tradition of moral enquiry might adequately explain the difficulties of another particular tradition,” thus “defeating” it, even though there are no neutral standards sufficient to convince any rational agent whatsoever that such a defeat has taken place (as, for example, all but the most stubborn rational agents may be convinced that the proposition 2 + 2 = 4 is superior to the proposition 2 + 2 = 5); and finally, that recognition of defeat is so difficult that rival traditions of moral enquiry may coexist for centuries.
The second criticism he addresses deals with “those defenders of liberal and individualist modernity who frame their objections in terms of the liberalism versus communitarian debate.” Since I don’t know yet what a communitarian is, I don’t understand his brief denial of this charge; however, he does say that he doesn’t want anyone to conclude that he has much sympathy with contemporary conservatism, either. I don’t want to get my hopes up too much, but what we may have here is a person who can see through both of the dominant political modes of thought we have in this country.
The prologue concludes with the observation that it is by plain persons going about their everyday lives that a tradition of virtues is regenerated, the hope that such a time of renewal is in our future, and the recommendation that those hoping for the renewal should “resist as prudently and courageously and justly and temperately as possible the dominant social, economic, and political order of advanced modernity.”
Chapter 1: A Disquieting Suggestion
coming soon…
Verba Antiqua 