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Articles

Alasdair MacIntyre

Mike Fuller on a modern-day follower of Aristotle.

Alasdair MacIntyre’s main argument, vigorously pursued in his three books After Virtue, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, is that moral philosophy is in “grave disorder”. The disorder is of two sorts. The first is that, due to their having irreducibly different conceptual frameworks, there is no genuine possibility of critical dialogue between the rival schools of thought in ethics (Nietzscheans cannot talk to Aristotelians and neither can talk to the successors of the Enlightenment). The second kind of disorder is that many moral theories which claim to be rational are actually confused and internally inconsistent. He suggests this state of confusion applies particularly to the moral views of the Enlightenment thinkers and their successors; philosophers such as Kant, Sidgwick, and Moore, with their claims to objectivity, neutrality, the distinction between fact and value, the idea of morality as an autonomous sphere and discipline, and so on.

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