Alasdair MacIntyre

• After Virtue

MacIntyre’s Quartet

• After Virtue (1981)• Whose Justice, Which Rationality

(1988)• Three Rival Versions of Moral

Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (1990)

• Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (1999)

A Disquieting Suggestion

• Catastrophe and Fragmentation• Language is in a grave state of

disorder• Can only be detected by

philosophical history• Academic history is useless• If true, will necessarily appear

implausible

Three Interminable Moral Disagreements

• The moral justification of war• The moral permissibility of abortion• The nature of social justice

Three Features of These Arguments

• Conceptual incommensurability of premises– Hence interminable and shrill

arguments• Purport to be impersonal rational

arguments– In tension with first feature

• Variety of historical origins

The Emotivist Hypothesis

• Emotivists believe that “Contemporary moral argument is rationally interminable, because all moral, indeed all evaluative, argument is and always must be rationally interminable.”

• Emotivism is “the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character.”

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3d ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 11, 11-12.

Emotivism Fails as a Theory of Meaning

For three reasons:• Failure to identify moral feelings or

attitudes• Can’t explain impersonal force of moral

reasons• Expression of feeling is a function of use

not meaning

Emotivism as a Theory of Use

• Outcome of a three-stage history:– First: Moral practice embodies genuine

objective and impersonal standards which provide rational justification for actions and can themselves be rationally justified.

– Second: unsuccessful attempts to maintain objectivity of ethics but rational justification breaks down.

– Third: Emotivism widely accepted because of recognition that claims to rationality of discourse fail.

MacIntyre’s Hypothesis

“… One way of framing my contention that morality is not what it once was is just to say that to a large degree people now think, talk and act as if emotivism were true, no matter what their avowed theoretical standpoint may be. Emotivism has become embodied in our culture.”

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3d ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 22.

Emotivism and Contemporary Culture

• “… we live in a specifically emotivist culture.” • “… a wide variety of our concepts and modes

of behavior—and not only our explicitly moral debates and judgments—presuppose the truth of emotivism, if not at the level of self-conscious theorizing, at least in everyday practice.”

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3d ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 22.

Moral Philosophy and Sociology

• “A moral philosophy characteristically presupposes a sociology.”– Moral agency must be socially

embodied– Understanding a moral philosophy

requires spelling out what its social embodiment would be.

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3d ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 23.

Key to Social Content of Emotivism

“… the fact that emotivism entails the obliteration of any genuine distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations.”

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3d ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 23.