After Virtue

"I think that’s right. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . This is a sweeping book that goes from Aristotle up to today. The argument is not just the collapse of communities as you suggested, though it is the collapse of communities. It’s also about the transformation in how we think about the moral life that has purged the language of virtue from our speech and from our sensibility. According to MacIntyre’s argument, up until about 200 years ago, up until about just after Jane Austen finished writing her magnificent novels, through most of recorded human history, the moral life was discussed, thought of, experienced, in terms of the virtues. Were you courageous and self-disciplined? Generous and magnanimous? A good friend? Reliable? And so on. This is what defined the moral life, your qualities of mind and character. Round about the time of the high enlightenment, especially starting with Immanuel Kant, a new way of thinking of morality gained hold. This way of thinking about morality emphasises rules and intentions. If you could just figure out the right rules and if you have an intention to obey the right rules then you will have achieved moral excellence. Exactly. It’s probably true in many cases, but it might do an injustice to some libertarians because there are some versions of libertarianism which are essentially, as I understand them, philosophies of government’s relationship to the individual. After Virtue is not about the relationship between government and the individual; it’s about the individual and the moral life. In other words, I can affirm that government has a very limited role and still believe with Alasdair MacIntyre that the language in which we speak about morals has been degraded, that the virtues and language that involves quality of mind and character is the right language if we’re talking about the moral life. That this way of thinking about the moral life makes sense in a lived community, but that government doesn’t have much to do with all of this. Yes, you could push back with that and you would be justified in pushing back. Yes, though in MacIntyre’s case the intended target was not libertarians in America or in England but actually professors with progressive doctrines, people like John Rawls and those who follow John Rawls. But I think you’re right that the arguments that were targeted for John Rawls, and the Rawlsians of this world and other left-wing progressives, who thought that you could develop theories and that theories would provide you with instructions on the moral re-organisation of social and political life, also strike important blows at American libertarians."

"Yes. For example, Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the leading modern moral philosophers who’s revived the Aristotelian approach to ethics. After Virtue is his most famous book. It begins with this marvellous apocalyptic scenario in which he imagines a society where there’s been an anti-science revolution. Some time after this catastrophe, people begin to try to reconstruct Western science from the scraps that remain. They put together charred fragments of Euclid and Einstein, and try to make sense of them. But what they’re doing isn’t really science in the true sense, just fragments of science. MacIntyre’s point is that this is what’s happened to moral language in our society. We think we’re talking about morality, but actually we’re just left with the fragments of morality. Because what’s been lost is the central idea of human beings as creatures with an inherent end or purpose. He sees two main culprits. The first is modern, post-Newtonian science, which encourages us to think of the world in terms of causal forces, devoid of any intrinsic meaning or purpose. The other is the modern secular state. We think of the state as simply a neutral mechanism for enabling us to pursue our own individual projects, rather than as an institution devoted to the common good. The book ends with a prophetic passage in which he says that the task now is to create local forms of community, in which the moral life can still be lived in the new dark ages which are already upon us. It’s powerful stuff. It provides a historical account of how the notion of virtue arose, and why it’s been lost. I think that’s its main strength. He doesn’t have any very realistic positive recommendations."