After Virtue - Alasdiar MacIntyre

Come join Triangle Common Good in reading and discussing the works of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue.

This session will be facilitated by Ben Cook. Cook holds a PhD in philosophy and possesses a strong understanding of MacIntyre's work. This will be a chance to learn - in a beginner friendly way - from someone with background in the ideas we'll be talking about.

Alasdair MacIntyre was a professor for moral philosophy who began his career focused on a Marxist analysis of society before his 1980 conversion to Catholicism and reading of the works of Thomas Kuhn resulted in a transition to an approach influenced by St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine (although he maintained to the end of his career that he found Marx's critiques of capitalism accurate, even as he came to believe Marxism lacked a proper account of morality).

In After Virtue, MacIntyre argues that morality was previously grounded by an idea of "telos": the natural end(s) we should pursue as humans, tied to a concept of human flourishing. For him, the Enlightenment and liberal modernity severed the connection between morality and telos, and our moral language is now necessarily incoherent and empty. A belief in "emotivism", the idea that moral statements are just an expression of vague feelings of "boo" or "yay" rather than expressing belief in real propositions, has resulted from this. This emotivism accurately describes how we currently use moral language, but it has incorrectly caused people to believe that this is what moral language actually means. The way to restore a proper moral language then lies in the return of teleological virtue, where morality follows pursuing the natural ends of well-functioning humans.

We'll be looking at his work as it relates to the group's goal of considering the idea of "what is the good?" and what constitutes a proper account of human flourishing.

Yale Moral Foundations of Politics Lectures on MacIntyre
Part I
Part II

MacIntyre's on His Philosophy:
https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/on-having-survived-the-academic-moral-philosophy-of-the-20th-century/