Critique of Modern MoralityĪmong his targets are those who sought to show that rationality could supply morality with foundations, such as Rawls. To convince us of this view, he surveys the main moral philosophies of the past couple of centuries. To understand why he sees this as an attractive idea, we must first engage with his critique of modern morality - which he sees as a kind of cargo cult where people are using moral terms despite moral discourse long having entered a state of incoherence. His book aims to chart a way out of our moral dark age by reintroducing the idea of a telos into morality: the idea that things have a given end or purpose, and something is “good” if it helps the object or entity attain that end. But can the solution to our malaise really lie in the resurrection of a form of ethics first outlined by Aristotle and later integrated into Christianity by Thomas Aquinas?įor MacIntyre, the answer is yes. In making such claims the book has proved to be prescient: the faltering hegemony of liberalism and recurrent surges of anti-elite sentiment across the West testify to that. That is a crude albeit faithful summary of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, first published in 1981. And navigating a way out of our current societal malaise requires us to resurrect an older form of morality. The limited expertise of our governing elites cannot justify the vast power they claim. The Enlightenment project for morality has failed.
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