Alasdair MacIntyre: After Virtue

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LECTURE 9

• Alasdair MacIntyre After Virtue

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Alasdair MacIntyre
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Features of Contemporary Moral Disagreement

• Premises are incommensurable
• Arguments have different historical origins
• Arguments put forward as having impersonal
  authority

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The Characters of Modern Culture

• The Aesthete
• The Manager
• The Therapist

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The Enlightenment Project

• The attempt to give a rational justification of
  morality which is based on human nature
• Hume-relevant features of human nature are
  characteristics of the passions.
• Kant--relevant feature of human nature is the
  universal and categorical character of certain
  rules of reason.

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Rejects
Divine Moral Law
Secular Anti-Aristotelianism
Reject
Contentless Rules
Protestantism andJansenism
Rules ?Virtues
Rejects
Human-nature-as-it-could- be-if-it-realized-its-te
los
Human-nature-as-it- happens-to-be
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Our Condition

• The Enlightenment Project Failed
• It Had to Fail
• We Must Choose Between
• Nietzsche Post modern Irrationality
• Aristotle Tradition of the Virtues

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Different Accounts of the Virtues

• Homer
• Aristotle
• New Testament
• Benjamin Franklin
• Jane Austen

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The Nature of the Differences in the Accounts of
the Virtues

• Different Lists of virtues
• Different Ordering of virtues
• Different relations of virtues to the social
  orders

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Virtues are to be Defined in Relation to

• Practices
• Narratives
• Traditions