After Virtue

Introduction

Published in 1981, the book opens with an image: imagine that the natural sciences had been destroyed and later pieced together from fragments whose context had been forgotten. That, MacIntyre claims, is the condition of modern moral language – which is why moral disputes seem interminable and morality looks like the expression of preferences, as emotivism holds. The Enlightenment project of justifying morality without a shared idea of the human good was bound to fail. MacIntyre reconstructs an Aristotelian tradition of the virtues, defined through social “practices”, the narrative unity of a human life and living traditions. The book became a central text of the communitarian critique of liberalism, although MacIntyre rejected that label.

Connections

Builds on

• Nicomachean Ethicsc. 340 BCE · Aristotle
• Modern Moral Philosophy1958 · G. E. M. Anscombe

Criticizes

• On the Genealogy of Morality1887 · Friedrich Nietzsche
• A Theory of Justice1971 · John Rawls
• Anarchy, State, and Utopia1974 · Robert Nozick