So justice will for the aristotelian be when something is done with virtue with the final teleological goal in view, which of course will be denied by the liberal, for whom there is no such thing as a one good, outside giving freedom to everyone to achieve his own freedom as put by both Hayek and MacIntyre.
Overall this may as well be the most captivating book on philosophy I've ever read, to the point where I talked about him for 20 minutes to my date. Highly recommended for everyone who has an interest in the essential text of critique of modernity.
View 1 comment. Jul 29, Vagabond of Letters, DLitt rated it it was amazing. Jun 23, David rated it it was amazing. MacIntyre's After Virtue is one of my favorite books of all time, so I was excited to begin this book which is a follow-up to that one. It is a follow-up, but I found it much tougher to get through. After Virtue was a book that any person interested in philosophy and ethics, whether a pastor or just a person who reads that type of book for fun, could work through and appreciate.
I found this book more difficult because of the subject matter. Here MacIntyre takes us on a history of ethics, ultima MacIntyre's After Virtue is one of my favorite books of all time, so I was excited to begin this book which is a follow-up to that one.
Here MacIntyre takes us on a history of ethics, ultimately laying out four philosophical traditions: Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume and modern liberalism. I just wasn't super interested in the details of things like ancient Greek philosophy leading up to Aristotle.
So if the history of philosophy is your thing, then this book is for you. For me, the best chapters were when MacIntyre got to modern liberalism and began discussing the challenges of different philosophical traditions interacting. The problem, which is a large point in After Virtue, is that each tradition speaks its own language and defines itself on its own terms and thus appears rational on the inside. But there is no common ground to speak between traditions, which is why people seem to talk past each other.
Further, since the modern liberal mindset appears to us the default, our culture sees the other traditions as irrational or old fashioned. Once we realize modern liberalism is a tradition among others, the problem shifts.
Now those other traditions are not just outmoded systems, but powerful stories alongside what actually is another tradition rather than the default, "just way things are".
Overall, I'd say read After Virtue first and if you're interested in the subject, tackle this one too. Mar 11, Jeremy Garber rated it it was amazing Shelves: philosophy , religion. Macintyre continues the amazing intellectual work he began in After Virtue by examining four paradigms of practical reasoning, their history, and most importantly, their incompatibility.
He observes that each views the individual who is wanting to make a moral decision in a different social capacity that determines how they will ma Macintyre continues the amazing intellectual work he began in After Virtue by examining four paradigms of practical reasoning, their history, and most importantly, their incompatibility.
He observes that each views the individual who is wanting to make a moral decision in a different social capacity that determines how they will make that moral choice. The Aristotelian considers the individual qua a voting i. Hume, who argued that only passions ruled moral decisions and the only goal of moral decision was to protect the satisfying of those passions without bloodshed, considers the individual qua noble landowning citizen.
As Macintyre observes, this means that what was formerly considered the vice of greed pleonexia has now been transformed into a capitalist virtue. And this individualist capitalism led to modernity, in which each individual makes a choice qua individual, and passions no longer need to be regarded but are a de facto right of the individual in the marketplace.
I was most struck by his observation that extending the moral law in the Thomist tradition protects the poor and oppressed in a way that neither Aristotle nor Hume support — Aquinas says that if you have to steal bread to feed your family, that is moral! Poor people have nothing to be proud of from a Humean view. And Macintyre finally characterizes modernism accurately as pretending to be objective when in fact it is just another socially constructed tradition like Aristotle or Aquinas, one which allows the principles of the marketplace to make moral decisions for the individual — even if the individual thinks they are making decisions themselves.
Those of us who subscribe to a tradition that does value the poor and oppressed would do well to read this history. Recommended for philosophers, theologians, and graduate students of philosophy and theology in particular. Even more fundamentally, the Great Books approach insists that there is a canon of texts by reference to which we can rationally discuss the canons of reason itself.
Religious tests per se may still be excluded, but political and ideological tests effectively tyrannize many academic departments. Yet another set of questions must be raised. Two such he rather derisively dismisses, and a third he does not even mention: the Judeo-Christian tradition, Western civilization, and the American experience.
For example, there are clearly practices that characterize the American experience, and those practices are embodied in institutions, and underlying those institutions there are, or used to be, beliefs.
Nor is it the case, contra MacIntyre, that the American tradition is exhaustively or even adequately articulated in the terms of liberal individualism. For one devoted to the importance of the historically contingent, MacIntyre is in some respects strangely ahistorical.
All that said, however, this remains a critically important book. MacIntyre helps us to understand why so many people are stymied today in articulating the beliefs that underlie their traditions of inquiry, practice, and public discourse. One enemy, he makes clear, is the delusion of false universality, the impulse to escape from historical particularity, the adherence to a tradition of anti-traditionalism.
MacIntyre also helps us to see how and why that set of ideas has gained such intellectual dominance, and why now its string of victories may be—just may be—coming to an end.
At the very least, MacIntyre better equips us to expose the stand taken by the proponents of anomie and ideological rage who would deny to others the right to take their stand. Login Access your Commentary account. Email address. Remember me. Forgot your password? Username or email. Reset password. Go back. Share via: More. You may also like. Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number. War without Morality 2. Which Rationality? Virtues and Consequences 4.
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