After Virtue by MacIntyre

Overview

After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1981) is Alasdair MacIntyre's masterpiece and the most influential book of the modern revival of virtue ethics. The book opens with a striking thought experiment: imagine that the natural sciences were destroyed by a catastrophe, and that the fragments of the old science were later reconstructed without understanding — the people would use the words "mass," "gravity," and "energy" without the framework that gave them meaning. MacIntyre's claim is that this has happened to ethics: the moral vocabulary of the modern world — the "rights," the "duties," the "obligations" — survives as fragments of a lost framework, and the modern moral debates are interminable because the disputants argue within incommensurable fragments. The book's diagnosis is followed by its recovery: the account of the tradition of the virtues — the narrative of the moral life from Aristotle through the medieval tradition to the modern neglect — and the conclusion that the virtues can be recovered only within the practices, the narratives, and the traditions that give them their meaning.

Author

Alasdair MacIntyre (born 1929) is a Scottish philosopher, one of the most important moral philosophers of the twentieth century. He taught at a series of universities in Britain and America — including Oxford, Essex, Boston University, Vanderbilt, and Notre Dame — and his After Virtue (1981) is the founding text of the modern virtue-ethics revival. His later works — Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990), and Dependent Rational Animals (1999) — developed the account of the tradition and of the virtues.

Historical Background

The book belongs to the revival of virtue ethics that began with Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy" (1958) and the growing dissatisfaction with the two dominant theories — the utilitarianism and the deontology that had divided the modern ethics between them. MacIntyre's diagnosis went deeper: the failure of the modern ethics is not the failure of one theory or another but the failure of the whole project of the modern moral philosophy — the project of grounding the ethics in the universal reason, without the tradition and the community that the virtues require. The book recovered the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues — the account of the good life as the life of the practices, the narrative, and the tradition — and it remains the most powerful statement of the case for the ethics of the virtues.

Key Ideas

The Diagnosis: The Fragments of the Moral Language

The book's opening argument is the diagnosis of the modern moral crisis. The modern moral vocabulary — the rights, the duties, the obligations — survives as the fragments of the divine-law framework that gave it meaning, and the modern moral debates are interminable because the disputants argue from incommensurable premises: the utilitarian appeals to the consequences, the deontologist to the rights, and neither can persuade the other because there is no shared standard. The diagnosis explains the peculiar character of the modern moral disagreements: they are at once interminable and inescapable — we cannot stop arguing, and we cannot agree.

The Recovery: The Tradition of the Virtues

The recovery is the account of the virtues within the tradition. The virtues are the acquired qualities of character that enable the person to achieve the goods internal to the practices — the goods of the craft, the game, the discipline that can be achieved only by the exercise of the virtues. The virtues are exercised within the narrative of a life — the single story in which the virtues of the moments are united — and the narrative is embedded in the tradition — the community of the practitioners that carries the standards across the generations. The account recovers the three elements that the modern ethics had abandoned: the practice, the narrative, and the tradition.

Important Passages

The most famous passages of the book are the opening thought experiment of the catastrophe: "Imagine that the natural sciences were destroyed in a catastrophe... later, the fragments of the old science were reconstructed, but without the understanding that gave them their meaning"; the definition of the virtue: "A virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices"; and the conclusion: "The virtues are to be understood as those dispositions which will not only sustain practices and enable us to achieve the goods internal to practices, but which will also sustain us in the relevant kind of quest for the good, by enabling us to overcome the harms, dangers, temptations, and distractions which we encounter."

Influence

After Virtue transformed the modern ethics. It made the virtue ethics a living alternative to the utilitarianism and the deontology, and it supplied the historical narrative that the revival needed — the account of the tradition of the virtues and its modern neglect. Its diagnosis of the interminable moral disagreement has shaped the modern meta-ethics, and its account of the practice, the narrative, and the tradition has influenced the ethics, the political philosophy, and the philosophy of education. The book is regarded as one of the most important works of moral philosophy of the twentieth century, and it remains the standard reference of the virtue-ethics tradition.

Sources

• MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981; 3rd ed. 2007.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Alasdair MacIntyre" (plato.stanford.edu/entries/macintyre)