MacIntyre also attributes the failings of the Enlightenment to the ascribing of moral agency to the individual alone. However, the elimination of key cultural artifacts led their society to embrace modern culture to such an extent that much of the society’s individuality was erased, priming it for takeover by colonial forces. When King Kamehameha II eliminated the taboos of the culture to modernize society, he met little resistance. MacIntyre illustrates his point by looking at other cultures that underwent similar transitions, including the Polynesian people.

This shift left ethics, as a body of knowledge, devoid of its central concept, reduced to a vocabulary list (e.g., the various virtues and vices) with no context, dooming those philosophers to irrelevance. Ancient ethics relied on the idea that human life had a proper end or character, but Renaissance science largely rejected this concept, concentrating instead on defining the processes of nature.

He traces the Enlightenment’s specific failure to its abandonment of Aristotelianism, and in particular the concept of teleology (defined by Aristotle as a reason or explanation for something in the function of its purpose). He argues that the morality built out of this movement was doomed due to the centuries before having dismantled earlier progress.

MacIntyre traces this pattern back to the Enlightenment. The institutions of morality established in earlier eras have been dismantled, and we are simply performing a mimicry of them. He uses this to illustrate his argument that we are in a similar state when it comes to morality. This guide uses the second edition of After Virtue, published by University of Notre Dame Press in 1984.Īfter Virtue begins with an allegory that asks a hypothetical question: In a world where all sciences have been dismantled by catastrophe and society has been left to reassemble them, what would they look like if reassembled from the remnants of knowledge that survived? MacIntyre argues that while they would be superficially similar, they would be devoid of real scientific content due to the absence of key suppositions and attitudes. Reissued in two expanded editions in 19, it has been praised and analyzed by ethicists and philosophers and is studied widely in philosophy classes. Exploring themes of what it means to be truly moral, how morality affects society, and what happens to a society when morality becomes a secondary concern, After Virtue is considered one of the most important texts in the modern field of ethics.

After virtue book