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« Broadband half full, half empty, or maybe we should be more ambitious about our glass? || Back to Blog | Cat and Girl » July 11, 2007
I just finished Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. As I blogged last week, I am knocked over by the breadth and depth of his learning, and his ability to pull together multiple threads. Just amazing. I had first read the book shortly after it came out in 1981. I didn't remember, however, that it is a cliffhanger. He does a magnificent job dismantling our principle-based view of morality. He proposes virtue as its replacement and does, well, a magnificent job of tracing the history of that concept through multiple millennia. And I am overall sympathetic to recognizing the role of community in the founding of morality and ethics. But I didn't think he quite pulled the rabbit out of the hat. Perhaps that's because he ends the book with his sleeve rolled up and up to the elbow in the hat. The positive construction of a value-based ethics he leaves for a later book. I haven't read the later book :( There are several key points in his positive account of the virtues that I didn't think he grounded well enough, although I am happy to withhold judgment until I read the next book. In particular, I want to see if his notion of the intrinsic good of virtues gets him to where he wants to go (distinguishing important, moral virtues from other types of excellences), how much diversity in the taxonomy of virtues he allows, whether he can really maintain the idea that lives have (are constituted by?) narratives, and whether his notion that a moral community has to be in conversation about its purpose brings us back to the typical philosophical narcissism that says that the good life is the philosophical life. Even so, the book is fantastic. For example, his few pages on Nozick and Rawls scratches just the itch I always knew I had about those two: They write about morality as if we are rational agents making up our minds about joining a community, rather than as complex creatures who only are what we are because we are already in a community. MacIntyre works similar magic on everything from Homer to Jane Austin. [Tags: alasdair_macintyre virtue philosophy ethics morality ] Posted
by D. Weinberger at July 11, 2007 11:42 AM
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Comments
Finding and formulating ethical principles that we would all find acceptable and by which we could live in harmony is a doddle.
The difficulty is in getting the fucking killing machine that is Homo Sapiens to actually live by them - before this civilised community of immoral makers and merchants of atomic munitions and other mechanisms of mass murder mutually assure mankind's destruction.
Nothing like a wee brain teaser before breakfast eh?
Posted by: Crosbie Fitch | July 11, 2007 01:07 PM
also, in regard to Mr. Crosbie Stills Nash Young and Fitch, ditto, but plus virtue and morality mean differently. that is, they are baseless propedeutic and heuristic notions, sensible nowhere in physics, like bananas are, for instance, then the police come in, even neophytes. I like tall tales like Young Guns better, even though guns are nowhere in physics, like are hermit crabs and betta fish, or fireflies
Posted by: Tarantula Bob | July 11, 2007 04:07 PM
Now, I am compelled to add, by virtue of the rational intellect alone, that Morality, even when set to categorical decree, switches sides, it is well understood, being dialectical, and founded upon the currently dominant idea of what is society--as in the phil of right by the Heg. Being so, let us not loose our brand of cynicism in the face of such forces: they are stout and greedy. If they could make an idea machine the way they make a particle accelerator/atom smasher thing, we might then see the dialectic free and clear. But, until then, you know that the dominant paradigm is that of mercantile trade, and what is "Moral" follows. We may be equal under the law, but only in dollar signs. Below that threshhold, it is a tawdry, dusty, and dimly lit place. Ask Hades.
Posted by: ps from post 2 | July 11, 2007 05:37 PM
>typical philosophical narcissism that says that >the good life is the philosophical life
I know "the unreflected life is not worth living", which could produce a view that the philosophical life is the good life. Is there any particular philosopher who expounds the converse (as distinct from believing it)?
Posted by: Des Walsh | July 11, 2007 09:21 PM
in reply to Des above: a paraphrase of a tautological cliche is exactly what po'mo' makes the tradition out to be, albeit without the fancy frills, but to unwrap the cover of a book, and then unfold its content, is not the same as riding the Tour de France while thinking.
Posted by: Dang Hardy | July 12, 2007 10:37 AM