After Virtue - A Lecture on MacIntyres Work "After Virtue"- 2nd Half (Doctoral Lecture)

After Virtue2nd Part - Alasdair MacIntyre

Emotivism has taken over

today’s society

Utility vs. Rights?

The Deconstruction of Western Philosophy

Nietzsche vs. Aristotle?

Chapter 10The Virtues in Heroic Societies

• Virtues of Courage and Friendship

• “morality and social structure are in fact one and the same in the heroic society…one set of social bonds.” pg 123

• areté - which translates later as virtue used to describe excellence.

• A contrast of the emotive self and the self of the heroic age.

• Requires particular human + social structure

• Heroic social structure is enacted epic narrative…(exp. Iliad)

We are what the past has made us.

Chapter 11The Virtues of Athens

• Virtues of honor, justice, and sophron (control of one’s passions) plus friendship, companionship, and citizenship (there are also vices)

• Unity of the virtues

• citizenship = goodman

• heroic literature provides the moral structure (example: Plato’s Republic)

• a problem: honor changes from Homer to Sophocles and honor is detached from any particular social role.

• Stoic was similar to Kant: Virtues goodness ≠ happiness or desires

• We are what the past has made us.

Political, dramatic, philosophical were more intimately related

Dramatic Form

Politics PhilosophyShaped by

dramatic form

The preoccupations of drama where both

Philosophy had to make its claims in the

arena of politics and the dramatic

MacIntyre adopts “…to adopt a stance on the virtues will be to adopt a stance on the narrative character of life.” - pg 144

Chapter 12Aristotle’s Account of Virtues

• Not just Aristotle’s ideas but a tradition of thought and was grounded within the city-state.

• Virtues achieve Telos

• Two types of virtues:

1. Intellectual virtues acquired through teaching

2. Virtues of character from habitual exercise

• For each virtue there are 2 corresponding vices.

• The exercise of virtues is not a means to the end.

• MacIntyre highlights “…the relationship between virtues and forms of narrative.” - pg 147

• Central virtues are related to each other…they work together.

“…a morality of virtues requires as its counterpart a conception of moral law.” pg 200

Chapter 13Medieval Aspects and Occasions

• The 4 cardinal virtues of justice, prudence, temperance, and courage

• The theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity are added

• “Virtue is thus conformity to cosmic law both in internal disposition and in external act.” pg 169

• Some things are not compatible with Aristotle such as forgiveness, humility, and human dignity (everyone accepted).

“It is this linking of a biblical historical perspective with an Aristotelian one in the treatment of the virtues which is the unique achievement of the middle

ages in Jewish and Islamic terms as well as Christian.” - pg 180

Chapter 14The Nature of the Virtues

• to many virtues: Homer, Sophocles, Aristotle, the New Testament, and medieval thinkers…“differ from each other in to many ways.” pg 181

• 3 Type of virtues to confront (pg 185 last paragraph):

1. “…a virtue is a quality which enables an individual to discharge his or her social role (Homer)

2. “…a virtue is a quality which enables an individual to move towards the achievement of the specifically human telos, whether natural or supernatural (Aristotle, the New Testament and Aquinas)”

3. “…a virtue is a quality which has utility in achieving earthly and heavenly success (Frnaklin)

A Reconstruction:

A structure is needed for Virtues across cultures: 1) Practice, 2) Narrative and 3) Moral Tradition.

“…in terms of practices that I have located their point and function. Whereas Aristotle locates that point and function in terms of the notion of a type of whole human life which can be called good.” - pg 201

“…the essential function of virtues is clear. Without them, without justice, courage, and truthfulness, practices could not resist the corrupting power of institutions.” - pg 194

Chapter 15The Virtues, the Unity of a Human Life

and the Concept of a Tradition• “…the unity of a virtue in someone’s life is intelligible idly as a characteristic

of a unitary life, a life that can be conceived and evaluated as a whole…. a concept of self whose unity resides in the unity of a narrative which links birth to life to death as narrative begging to middle to end…” pg 205

• a self in a narrative mode.

• “…making the notion of intelligibility the conceptual connecting link between the notion of action and that of narrative.” pg 214

“…modernity petitions each human life into variety of segments, each with its own norms and modes of behavior. So work is divided from leisure, private life from public, the corporate from person. So both childhood and old age have been wrenched way from the rest of human life and made over into

distinct realms.” pg 204

Chapter 16From the Virtues to Virtue and after Virtue• “…the concept of narrative unity and the concept of

practice….displaced. pg 226

• “Concept of a practice with goods internal to itself…removed to the margins.” pg 227

• “Work moves outside the house and is put to the service of impersonal capital.” pg 227

“…any specific account of the virtues presupposes an equally specific account of the narrative structure and unity of human life

and vice versa.” – pg 243

Chapter 17Justice as a Virtue: Changing Conceptions

• “Aristotle considered justice as the first virtue of political life….a community which lacks practical agreement on a conception of justice must also lack the necessary basis for political community.” - pg 244

• Rawls, Nozick, and others focus on the external goods.

A rejection of the modern economic and political order is needed to bring back a tradition of virtues.

Chapter 18After Virtue: Nietzsche or Aristotle,

Trotsky and St Benedict• Rules find their places within virtues…focused on the telos

which is human flourishing.

• The characters “…almost all the availability culturally recognizable roles; the notions of the expertise of the few and of the moral agency of everyone are presuppositions of the dramas which those characters enact.” - pg 257

Nietzsche and his philosophical ancestry have failed. According to MacIntyre, the Aristotelian tradition is the better alternative. “An alternative way of envisaging both the social sciences and society, one with which the Aristotelian tradition

can easily be at home.” – pg 259

Critique

• “…any adequate generally Aristotelian account must supply a teleological account which can replace Aristotle’s metaphysical biology. pg 163

• Can the teleology be preserved around human flourishing?

Outside Critiques

• Accused of nostalgia and idolizing the past

• Some claim MacIntyre as a postmodern because of accusations of relativism

• Rivals also claim him as a communitarian/socialist

Critique:My 3 Open Questions

1. Can the characters identified by MacIntyre be redeemed by virtues?

2. Is Virtue Ethics an answer for Sustainability? (My personal experience with this question).

3. Can Levinas’s concept of the “face of the other” and the method of virtue ethics be reconciled?

Question #1:Can the characters identified by MacIntyre be redeemed

by virtues?

Bureaucratic Manager The Therapist The Rich Aesthete

Can the bureaucratic manager be redeemed?

What is needed….

• A Practice

• A Narrative

• A Moral Tradition

2.

Is Virtue Ethics an answer for Sustainability? (My personal experience with this question).

Sustainability

People (Social)

Profit (Economic) Planet

(Environmental)

Utility

Rights

What is needed?• Currently the discussion is grounded in utility (finance

department) vs. rights (social responsibility dept.). This has brought the debate to a standstill.

• It only becomes important when external goods are about to be affected (reputation, money, etc.)

• Virtue Ethics provides a method for the focus on internal goods first but a metaphysical and biological grounding is still needed.(Story - USF)

3.Can Levinas’s concept of the “face of the other” and the method of virtue ethics be reconciled?

How do you ensure that MacInytre’s Virtue Ethics does not end in “Being” or a focus on self first ie internal?

Is this perspective in contrast with Levinas’s conclusion that “the relationship is the ethical”?

Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995)

• Big Concept: Western Philosophy has created and obsession with being and forgets the other

• We cannot rule grasp the what we see in the face of the other…it is

• A reaction Heidegger: “To the impersonal totality of being reduced to “the same” (CDP pg 498)

Story: UC Berkeley Extension

“The other aspect of narrative selfhood is correlative: I am not only accountable, I am one who can always ask others

for an account, who can put other to the question. I am part of their story, as they are part of mine. The narrative of any one life is part of an interlocking set of narratives.” - pg 218

Questions for Group Discussion

1. Does MacIntyre succeed in his argument for virtue ethics even though he is charged with relativism?

2. What is the definition of virtue in Aristotle’s writings as highlighted by MacIntyre? Does MacIntyre just revive Aristotelian ethics or reconstruct a modern virtue ethic?

3. How would you answer MacIntyre’s charge of modern characters promoting and spreading Emotivism? Can these characters ever be virtuous or redeemed?