The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review

BOOK REVIEWS After Virtue. By ALASDAIR 1\1AclNTYRE. University of Notre Dame Press. Pp. vii + 252. $15.95. After Virtue tells a story. It is the story of the corrosive dismantling of an Aristotelian ethics of virtue, begun in the Enlightenment, carried on by G. E. Moore in Principia Ethica, continued by analytic philosophers, enshrined in emotivism, and recognized only by Nietzsche. The setting for the story is the ravaged world of contemporary morality, a landscape marred by " a disquieting private arbitrariness," " the conceptual incommensurability of rival arguments," interminable moral debates, and anarchic subjectivism . The mood of the story is bleak. Modern-day ethicists flounder in confusion because all we possess " are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived" (p. 2). Worst of all, what makes a resolution so unlikely is that "we are in a condition which almost nobody recognizes and which perhaps nobody at all can recognize fully " (p. 4) . To the storyteller belongs the plot. The task of the storyteller is to take us through his story, to point us to the beginning but also to show us the end. The genius of Alasdair Macintyre, the storyteller, is that in his After Virtue we are the story. After Virtue is a story about ourselves, a story Macintyre tells to alert us to the nature of our own moral world. The challenge to Alasdair Macintyre, the storyteller, is not only to alert us but to prepare us to end the story of After Virtue by providing an alternative to the "barbarism and darkness" already upon us. That alternative is Aristotelianism , an Aristotelianism refurbished in a narrative tradition. MacIntyre ends his story by returning to its beginning; that is, After Virtue doesn't really end at all. It begins again. It is a story to be re-told, but if that retelling is not madness, if it is not to be crushing and wearisome, then its denouement cannot be tragic. Does After Virtue offer an alternative to tragedy? An attempt to answer this question will focus on five points crucial to Macintyre's story: his account of what makes modern morality modern; the significance of Aristotle as the key figure in his story; the importance of narrative in properly understanding the moral life; what MacIntyre means by practice; and, finally, the need for a specific narrative to characterize a concrete account of the virtues. Macintyre begins his book with an arresting analogy. He asks us to imagine a time when natural science has been destroyed because the public blames it for a series of catastrophes. Later there is a reaction against this destruction and an attempt is made to revive science. But, since there are 313 314 BOOK REVIEWS no longer any coherent accounts of the various forms of science existing, all that can be recovered are bits and pieces of theories and experiments, instruments whose use has been forgotten, and so on. But these fragments are enough for some to think they have reconstituted physics, biology, etc. Arguments develop concerning the relative merits of various theories of the past although the contestants possess only a partial knowlelge of each. Even more disturbing, because they lack any idea of the beliefs and history that inform these theories, they have no way to know how the relative merits of these theories might be tested. As a result rival theories are put forward with no means of assessing which is the most plausible. Soon philosophers of " science " develop subjectivist theories of the status of scientific claims. Macintyre contends that the moral world we currently inhabit corresponds almost exactly to this imaginary world of science. We find ourselves amid " fragments " of past moral systems with no means to assess their relative merits. As a result emotivism, though a mistaken account of the meaning and use of moral language, is the most nearly truthful account of our modern condition. The emotivist is right that we possess no means to settle claims between incommensurable positions; for we lack the common presuppositions about our nature that such agreements require. Moreover Macintyre argues that the Enlightenment project to provide an independent rational justification of morality has...