Review of Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning and Narrative by A. MacIntyre

Excerpt

This book is both a summation and distillation of MacIntyre’s ‘mature project’ which began with After Virtue in 1981. This argued that the failure of Enlightenment moral philosophy to achieve its aim of a rationally justified and universally applicable ethics was inevitable because adherence to ethical schemes could only be justified within a teleological account of the human agent which the Enlightenment denied. The virtue traditions, in all their variety, had provided both accounts of ethical action and of its justification which avoided this problem and were not vulnerable to the devastating Nietzschean critique of Enlightenment moral philosophy. After Virtue held that the replacement of the virtue traditions by Enlightenment moral philosophy was explicable in terms of the loss of those local communal contexts in which such traditions were secured. Despite the inherent pessimism of this account, After Virtue became a classic and was quickly taken up across a range of disciplines, principally as a source of critique. Other than Aristotle, MacIntyre is the most widely cited writer by business ethicists working on the virtues (Ferrero and Sison 2014). …