After Virtue - Alasdair MacIntyre

We are stuck in a world with no manner of reconciling competing moralities.  The work of Enlightenment philosophers, and the subsequent rise of liberal individualist society has transformed morality from a state of order to one of disorder. Alasdair MacIntyre identifies this shortcoming of the modern condition and seeks to explore both how we got here and how a fulsome appraisal of western philosophical /moral history can inform us on potential paths forward. For MacIntyre philosophy and sociology must go hand-in-hand. How can we adequately describe a social context without examining the tenets upon which it is founded? Conversely, how can we adequately investigate and/or criticize a moral or philosophical system without an awareness of what history and world it arose in response to? We do ourselves and the moralities we investigate a disservice in our attempts to sever them from the world.

Looking across the broader currents of the western philosophical tradition, MacIntyre contextualizes when, where, and in response to what our moralities have been founded, and how our modern logos is a palimpsest of our intellectual traditions. Venturing back to the Illiad and Homeric notions of the hero, MacIntyre clearly demonstrates the extent to which moral systems were inextricably entangled in relationships and duties of the social sphere. Moving through to the days of Athenian democracy, he shows how morality became extended beyond bonds of kinship, to the polis writ large. Of course, the fact that Attica contained numerous city-states meant that morality had to lose some of its absolute claims: for acting rightly in one city may mean something different than acting rightly in another. Here MacIntyre focuses in on the ethics of Aristotle (most thoroughly discussed are the ideas contained in the Nicomachean Ethics), claiming that it was largely an Aristotelian morality that would be carried through into the Middle Ages, only to be rejected by the Enlightenment. What is crucial to his Aristotelian sympathy is the notion of the telos, that man's life is both an enacted, and situated within, larger cohesive narrative(s). Whereas the liberal individualist account isolates each person into their own world, ostensibly claiming that our freedom also means being totally set-adrift from others, teleology places us along a path whereby our morality - as well as our struggles and efforts - are moving us toward something. For MacIntyre that something is the further development of what it means for each of us to be human. This is accomplished through, and in respect to, the exercise of the properly required virtue for any situation.

An inescapable conclusion of MacIntyre's is that any morality presupposes a sociology. No ethereal plane of Forms for this man. This also entails that a morality presupposes a history. MacIntyre thus has little use for the modern fact-moral distinction. Our morality cannot be separated from the world we inhabit. Likewise, our morality will shape our actions and thus the world around us. An awareness that these two spheres are not separate, that they feed into and co-create one another, opens up the possibility for a new way forward, whereby our moral concerns can be re-grounded in the world, and our lives can begin to embody the morality we never lost in the first place.