reading alasdair macintyre's after virtue

On my interpretation, MacIntyre makes three main arguments to justify the claim that rights are inimical to virtue ethics. This dissertation considers whether Alasdair MacIntyre’s reasons for rejecting rights terms are cogent. This upward movement of the inquiry is lost if the human end is redefined in social terms. This is reasonable only if these lives follow the function of man, if they practice virtue, and embrace contemplation which brings us closer to the gods. The ultimate end in human lives is happiness realized. If this framework of thought is dismantled there is no movement or change in human morality, as Aristotle understood it.

Because of the pure actuality, in the unmoved mover, the potentiality in every human being can be realized. If the human good is understood only in terms of practice, narrative unity, and tradition, the backbone of Aristotle’s ethics is dismantled in such a way that it will not lead to the solution MacIntyre claims. Aristotle’s ethics has a metaphysical grounding in that the Unmoved Mover, as the external main factor in the world around us, is the ultimate good and aim of the whole universe and the human race. The thesis of the project is that MacIntyre’s Aristotelian ethics in After Virtue is conceived in such a way that it does not land in a very different place than that of his emotivist partners in the debate. The purpose of this thesis is to analyze MacIntyre’s solution to the problem of modern morality it is a critical evaluation of MacIntyre’s Aristotelianism. I believe MacIntyre has philosophically overstated the conflict between Aristotle and liberal modernity. Finally, MacIntyre’s own epistemic arguments commit him to an ethical pluralism that poses a practical problem for his anti-liberalism. Next I trace MacIntyre’s revolutionary negation of liberalism to non-Aristotelian sources in the British New Left and its strain of Marxism.

There is no necessary link between liberalism and emotivism. In the first part I argue against MacIntyre’s assumption that liberal orders are by their very nature unable to foster Aristotelian virtues because they are hopelessly tied to an “emotivist” notion of self. In this paper I argue that MacIntyre’s claim that the adoption of Aristotle’s virtue ethics requires a radical rejection of the major institutions of liberalism is overstated.

Yet some scholars also identify him as a philosophical source of radically reactionary politics and anti-liberalism. Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the world’s most influential Aristotelian political theorists.

Reading alasdair macintyre's after virtue