Introduction to this work
This is a book review of Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue.
After Reading After Virtue
First, I would like to briefly acknowledge a couple of distractions before starting to explain what I found missing in After Virtue.
I noticed, especially in the beginning critiques, that the positions MacIntyre critiqued seemed to be always treated as paper-thin concepts, and/or often paper-thin wrappings around emotivism (the doctrine that moral assertions are just statements of our emotions instead of claims about what is right or moral). Meanwhile, his work on his preferred concepts such as a “character” and a “practice” are thick concepts.
Second, I noticed at least one instance of critiquing the concept of the unity of the virtues by positing someone who had the fullness of a virtue and the fullness of a vice. This is begging the question. Elsewhere, in regards to bridging from “is” to “ought,” he brings an unacknowledged enthymeme in going from “He is a sea-captain,” to “He ought to do the things a sea-captain out to do.” The unacknowledged premise is that there are things which a sea-captain ought to do, and MacIntyre on this point fails to provide a legitimate exception to C.S. Lewis’s assertion in The Abolition of Man of, “Either the premises concealed an imperative, or the conclusion remains in the indicative.” (Aristotelianism does not reach “ought” from “is.” Aristotelianism starts with “ought” and builds bridges from some “oughts” to other “oughts.” This may be acceptable and in fact I also do so, but what it is not is a bridge from “is” to “ought.”) I think that if I had read the text more slowly, I would have detected more fallacies.
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