After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

MacIntyre points out that conceptions of the virtues differ widely, and sometimes even incompatibly, between various cultures. MacIntyre compares ancient philosophers with the later Western writers Benjamin Franklin and Jane Austen to show how conceptions of the virtues changed over time. The overarching question he asks is whether all these Western thinkers can be said to have a shared concept of virtue at all.

For Homer, virtue was a quality that enabled a person to fulfill their social role. Homer included as virtues some qualities—like physical strength—that we would not consider virtues today, although MacIntyre points out that the Greek word for “virtue” can also be translated as “excellence.” Aristotle’s list of virtues differs from Homer’s in emphasizing the mental over the physical, reflecting the change of the paradigm of virtue from the warrior to the Athenian gentleman. The New Testament extols humility as a virtue, which Aristotle considered a vice, and adds faith, hope, and love (charity) while insisting that even the lowborn can be virtuous.

In the era of the Enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin emphasized practical virtues like “cleanliness, silence and industry” (183) and redefined many of the traditional virtues to serve a utilitarian ethic of success and prosperity. Jane Austen’s novels, on the other hand, draw from Christian and Aristotelian conceptions of virtue, extolling “constancy” as one of the main virtues. MacIntyre identifies Austen’s “constancy” with a singleness of purpose in which one remains true to the narrative unity of one’s life in pursuit of one’s telos. MacIntyre will return to a more detailed analysis of Austen in Chapter 16.

MacIntyre stakes an important claim: It is possible to extrapolate a “core concept” from these varied conceptions of the virtues. Behind these conceptions lie three features of social and moral life: practice, narrative, and tradition. These concepts will occupy MacIntyre for much of the rest of the book, and the rest of this chapter outlines his “core concept,” which will constitute his proposal for a viable scheme of ethics.

Practices (See: Index of Terms) are the immediate reason we cultivate the virtues and the arena in which they are performed. They encompass such varied human activities as “arts, sciences, games, politics […] the making and sustaining of family life” (188). Practices have standards and rules and evolve in history. They aim at both external and internal goods.

External goods include such things as fame and money, which are the property and possession of the individual carrying out the practice. Internal goods belong to the whole community affected by the practice. Possessing the virtues is necessary to achieve internal goods but may actually hinder us from achieving external goods. Nevertheless, external goods remain legitimate and are often involved in the virtues themselves. MacIntyre argues that the “core conception” he is outlining is Aristotelian in the best ways (e.g., it is teleological) while avoiding the undesirable aspects of Aristotle’s thought (e.g., his outdated metaphysics and exclusionary views of society).

However, above and beyond the specific goods at which virtues and practices aim, there must be a conception of an overall telos or good for human life. In order to grasp this concept, one must have a conception of human life as a whole embodying “singleness of purpose” (203). In the following chapter, MacIntyre will focus on the idea of life as a unity and a narrative.

The aim of this chapter is to define and justify a vision of human life “as a whole, as a unity, whose character provides the virtues with an adequate telos” (204). Such a view goes against the dominant modern ways of thinking, in which knowledge is compartmentalized and life is viewed as “a sequence of individual actions and episodes” (204). It is equally opposed to such modern philosophies as Sartre’s existentialism, which disparages social roles as “conventionality” and life as essentially chaotic and without meaning.

As a corollary to the view of human life as a unity, MacIntyre stresses that actions are only intelligible when seen in the context of intentions, beliefs, narrative history, and social setting—from an individual’s “intentions, motives, passions and purposes” (209). He argues that “narrative history of a certain kind turns out to be the basic and essential genre for the characterization of human actions” (208).

Amplifying this point, MacIntyre points out that many types of human interaction—e.g., conversation—can be characterized as dramas or “enacted narratives.” He adds that “action itself has a basically historical character” (212) and that “stories are lived before they are told” (212). Human lives can be said to have “genres” just like literary stories, which themselves are simply imitations of the dramatic structures inherent in real life. These structures include such phenomena as stories “embedded” within larger stories and people playing “subordinate parts in the dramas of others” (213). Although there is unpredictability in our lives, there is still a telos at the end of the road: “[U]npredictability and teleology therefore coexist as part of our lives” (216).

From these considerations, MacIntyre draws a central thesis: “[M]an is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal” (216). These stories, whether in the form of mythology or history or the Bible, play a key role in educating us about the virtues and teaching us about our own lives.

MacIntyre is now prepared to offer a summation of the chapter’s main idea: The unity of a human life consists in the unity of a narrative. Consequently, life is a moral quest, and the object of the quest is only understood through going through the quest itself. Thus, in traveling life’s journey with all its obstacles and moral challenges, we discover the nature of the good itself with the help of the virtues.

The final task of the chapter is to define the nature and role of tradition in this quest. This is necessary because we are not merely isolated individuals but are embedded in a community and a history, which give our life “its own moral particularity” (220). Traditions form who we are, and the past is “present to some degree in [one’s] present” (221). Whether we like it or not, we are all bearers of a tradition.

MacIntyre takes a stand against one view of tradition that is ideologically conservative and “Burkean,” in which tradition is portrayed as the opposite of reason and conflict. All reasoning is part of a tradition of thought, MacIntyre insists, and traditions are defined by means of argument about what good is. Thus, one cannot separate tradition from the idea of reasoning or the idea of conflict.

MacIntyre writes, “A living tradition then is an historically extended, socially embodied argument […] about the goods which constitute that tradition” (222). Our lives are embedded in, and only make sense within, “the larger and longer histories of a number of traditions” (222). Virtues in turn play a role in sustaining traditions so that we may achieve good in our lives; in this way, tradition helps carry us forward to the future.

MacIntyre describes what happened to virtue theory from the Enlightenment to the modern period. The general trajectory was from a conception of the virtues as plural (characteristic of Aristotelianism) to virtue as singular, and finally to a complete eclipse of the entire concept of virtue in favor of concepts like utility and rights. At the same time, we can see holdouts of Aristotelian thought and virtue ethics in such writers as Jane Austen.

MacIntyre explains that this whole development was inevitable, since the concepts of practice and of narrative unity, which underlie virtue ethics, were also eclipsed during the same period. MacIntyre links these losses to the emergence of the aesthete and the bureaucratic manager as the main characters of modern society.

Even though intellectuals were abandoning virtue theory, the virtues continued to have a hold on the imagination of society at large. As individualism came to the fore in society, thinkers tried to fit virtues in with this new conception. Virtues were reinterpreted as expressions of individual passions or as a necessary means of curbing the destructive effect of passions—as a solution to the problem of human egoism. These problems did not arise for Aristotle because he saw human beings as embedded within a community with shared goods rather than radically individual and isolated.

Such thinkers as Hobbes and Hume played a key role in this new conception. Hobbes conceived of human beings as selfish and destructive by nature. Hume tried to reconcile morality with human nature, but in the end, his ethical code turns out to be historically and culturally conditioned, no more than “the prejudices of the Hanoverian ruling elite” (231).

Hume’s philosophy of the virtues left its mark on subsequent philosophy in three main ways. Since the intellectual elite no longer believed that there were common goods for society, the virtues lost their original social context. Instead, they had to be shoehorned into an artificial or utilitarian scheme. Second, virtues came to be redefined as rule-following (deontology).

Finally, there was a shift from a conception of plural virtues to a singular virtue. This simplification and homogenization of morality led to a “linguistic mélange,” replacing the precise moral distinctions of Aristotelianism. Since teleology has been rejected, the virtues are now conceived as being “their own reward” instead of being practiced for the sake of an overarching goal. MacIntyre takes a survey of historical evidence for this shift in thought about the virtues, including 18th-century tombstones and funerary inscriptions.

Around the time of the French Revolution, a countermovement tried to revive virtue ethics under the guise of political republicanism, emphasizing equality, fraternity, and liberty. However, the revival failed because society was already conditioned away from the Aristotelian tradition, and it thus became necessary to impose republican values by force in the Reign of Terror.

MacIntyre identifies two intellectual holdouts who stood up for the virtue tradition. William Cobbett was a crusader for social change in England, while Jane Austen, through her fiction, identified a “social sphere within which the practice of the virtues is able to continue” (239) and reinforced the ties between narrative and life.

According to MacIntyre, the moral confusion brought about by the centuries-long shift in ethical thought is seen most clearly in our attitudes toward justice. MacIntyre provides an illustration of contemporary disagreement about justice.

Person A has worked hard and saved their money, and now finds their plans threatened by rising taxes. They argue that the government does not have the right to take away their justly-earned money. Person B is moved by the economic inequality they see around them and believes that redistributive taxation is the solution to this injustice. This is an example of two people on opposite sides invoking incommensurable standards of justice; according to MacIntyre, “our pluralist culture possesses no method of weighing, no rational criterion for deciding between claims based on legitimate entitlement against claims based on need” (246).

This incompatibility is not limited to the level of everyday public discourse, however; as MacIntyre argues, it is reproduced by the arguments of various philosophers. He cites two philosophers, Rawls and Nozick, who argue for respective positions very much like Person A and Person B. However, MacIntyre also points out that A and B’s arguments presuppose at least a remnant of the classical theory of the virtues—notably, the concept of just deserts—where the philosophers do not. On the other hand, the two philosophers both presuppose the liberal individualist view of society as a “collection of strangers, each pursuing his or her own interests” (251) instead of a view of society based on common goods.

For MacIntyre, these two examples illustrate how modern moral discourse is a hodgepodge of individualist assumptions mixed with “fragments from the tradition—virtue concepts for the most part” (252). As a result of this incoherence, it follows that “our society cannot hope to achieve moral consensus” (252), and thus politics becomes a form of “civil war” in which the loudest voice wins. One byproduct of this collapse of moral consensus is that patriotism becomes imperiled because the government no longer represents “the moral community of the citizens” (254), with the result that many citizens no longer feel a strong attachment to their country.

MacIntyre stresses that he is not arguing for anarchism; he is merely expressing his view that “the modern state” does not represent the idea of government as it existed in the older tradition and is not something to which people would willingly lend their loyalty and support. MacIntyre concludes the chapter by arguing that “modern systematic politics” must be rejected if the “tradition of the virtues” (255) is to be preserved.

In the final chapter, MacIntyre sums up the argument of the book and offers some prospects for the future.

The language and practice of morality are in “a state of grave disorder” due to the confused nature of moral discourse combining “ill-assorted conceptual fragments from various parts of our past” (256) and leading to unresolvable debates. This situation can be traced to the rejection of Aristotelian teleology in the early modern period of Western intellectual history.

Having abandoned a purpose-based understanding of reality, philosophers—beginning with the 17th- and 18th-century Enlighteners and continuing with the 19th-century utilitarians and beyond—tried to provide an alternative account of morality. These attempts all failed because of an incoherence inherent in combining modern ideas with cultural remnants from classical thought.

This failure was perceived by Nietzsche who, as a way forward, proposed throwing out the entire structure of moral belief and argument as it had existed up to that point. Nietzsche’s proposal would be plausible unless the rejection of Aristotelianism turned out to be mistaken in the first place. MacIntyre’s book has been a plea for the Aristotelian tradition, especially the doctrine of purpose or natural ends and Aristotle’s conception of the virtues and social life. In the process, MacIntyre argues that Nietzsche’s proposal is not in fact a valid alternative because it contains aspects of liberal individualism. Thus, the choice really comes down to Aristotle or liberal individualism.

MacIntyre argues that liberal individualism has failed to produce a “coherent rationally defensible statement” (259), whereas Aristotelianism can be rationally defended, particularly as a guide for modern social “attitudes and commitments.” MacIntyre’s conclusion is that a revival of Aristotelianism will help cure our situation of moral deadlock.

MacIntyre anticipates and responds to objections to his thesis. First, proponents of liberal individualism may disagree with MacIntyre’s analysis of the relevant history. MacIntyre states that he intends to write a second book responding to these critics. Second, some thinkers from within the Aristotelian tradition will disagree with some points of MacIntyre’s interpretation of that tradition. MacIntyre responds by invoking his belief about traditions being strengthened by conflict and internal critique. This belief applies to Aristotelianism as well: The fact that Aristotelians can disagree about some points shows the strength and validity of this school of philosophy.

Finally, Marxists—as represented historically by Trotsky—may argue that Marxism, and not Aristotelianism, is the viable alternative to liberal individualism. In his carefully-considered reply, MacIntyre argues that Marxism is itself tainted with “radical individualism,” as well as “Nietzschean fantasy” and so cannot function as an alternative. Although a rich “source of ideas about modern society,” Marxism is essentially “exhausted as a political tradition” (262).

In the final paragraph, MacIntyre draws a parallel between the decline of the Roman Empire and our current moral decline. In the earlier instance, certain people of goodwill sustained civilization by building up new institutions not tied to the idea of the empire. In our time, MacIntyre proposes that we try similarly to establish “new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained” so as to be able to survive “the new dark ages which are already upon us” (263).