It’s rewarding to seem him attempt a reconciliation between some modern epistemologies and Augustinian Thomism. I’m not sure he really pulls it off but his stature as a thinker in moral philosophy is undeniable.
Requiescat in pace.
He just believes in one fewer gods now.
-Alasdair MacIntyre
RIP
I get that modern ethics can feel fragmented, but the answer isn’t to retreat into tribalism or pretend reason can’t give us shared values across cultures.
Just because some people are bad at finding moral clarity doesn’t mean it’s impossible or meaningless.
-- Richard Taruskin [1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/10/arts/the-new-seasonclassi...
What makes you think that? A huge part of After Virtue (basically the whole part, after the initial diagnosis of where we are now and how we got here) is about how to construct and understand communities that might provide a shared idea of human good without simply going back to an Athenian idea of what that looks like. In fact if I were to summarize the book in a nutshell I would argue its an attempt to rehabilitate Aristotelian ethics without simply accepting Aristotle's own moral percepts.
If one considers that these two are decoupled, it poses a question: how could one live in alignment to a universal truth that one cannot know. It makes me wonder, can we find meaning without certainty.
Even in this age of the rejection of religious dogma, I tend to notice that people still want to cling to certainty. They are certain there is no morality (nihilism) or they are certain that morality can be found either in the study of nature (through empiricism) or reason (through rationalism).
I hardly ever see anyone suggest that they humbly do not know.
Perhaps you misunderstand what culture is. It isn't some kind of fiction we lay on top of reality that gets in the way of reality. It is a shared language of a people about reality and one that is not static, but hopefully developing, but at the very least changing. Science is itself a part of culture. You are born into a culture, which can be anything form pretty good to downright lousy, and the "dialogue" of this culture of a people with reality, and other cultures, moves the development of this culture.
Think of all the things you have learned in the scope of science. That aggregate of learning is culture. The presuppositions that science rests on is culture. This doesn't contradict the possibility of knowing the universal. Rather, it is through the cultural that you come to know the universal and through which you are better prepared to know it. We benefit from thousands of years of cultural dialogue. We cannot attain a very high understanding of reality without immersing ourselves in this dialogue of cultures spanning human history.
(Incidentally, as MacIntyre was a Catholic convert, one thing the Catholic Church makes possible is the existence of both the particularity of ethnos and the universality of the Church; "catholic" means "universal". A multiplicity of cultures sharing in the universal, avoiding both cultural parochialism and an alienated cosmopolitanism.)
Over the course of his career, MacIntyre went from an extreme left Marxist to an extreme right Thomist, and the only constant was his hatred of liberalism. He really couldn't stand the idea that people could believe in rationalism, feel the moral force of individual rights, or make purpose and meaning for themselves, all without appealing to an authoritarian source of control.
Well that was partly what After Virtue was about: arguing it wasn't possible to have an objective moral system without the supernatural.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Virtue
And he's not the only one to hold this view (many atheists do as well):
* https://global.oup.com/academic/product/atheist-overreach-97...
You're left with either Nietzsche's arbitrary will, or virtues (à la Aristotle). For the latter, MacIntyre attempted to develop a system of morality (? ethics?) based on human biology:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/655623.Dependent_Rationa...
Once can certainly tell oneself that there is a certain purpose or meaning to one's life, but if you're a materialist, then (the argument goes (AIUI)) it's not true.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is–ought_problem
The arrangement of atoms is arbitrary and without meaning, and to call some arrangement(s) "good" or "bad" or better / worse is a value judgement that is just as arbitrary and meaningless.
Lenin wrote like someone who hates liberalism. Stephen Miller gives that vibe from the right, though I doubt he can write anything coherent at all.
No, he's not. Not at all. Rorty has been and always will be more important, and more famous, than MacIntyre. This is not to insult MacIntyre, who was important within philosophical circles but not so much in the general public, except perhaps within religious groups, with which I'm not well acquainted.
Rorty's breadth of influence was also greater than MacIntyre's, ranging from "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" to "Achieving Our Country", addressing vastly different subjects and audiences.
[0] https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691217529/wh...
'When asked in 1996 what values he retained from his Marxist days, MacIntyre answered, “I would still like to see every rich person hanged from the nearest lamp post.”'
As the joke from the 00s went - in other news, Cisco has become today the first company to close its doors because all its employees cashed out their stock options and quit.
That is, hanging rich persons from the lamp posts is probably not the maxim that would resonate well on the HN :)
Faith being "confidence, trust or belief in a thing , person or concept, sometimes in the absence of proof"
Not to be confused with "blind faith" which is the above but with wilful ignorance or dismissal of proof that contradicts the aspect of the faith.
Also not to be confused with "religion" which is the social construct or organisation around a central faith.
You can have faith without religion, but you can't generally have a religion without faith.
I just don't think faith and philosophy are mutually exclusive.
My impression of organised religion is unfavourable so I'm almost certainly biased in my perspective of religion being the reason faith gets such a bad reputation.
Presents basic commitments as if they were simply the unavoidable presuppositions of moral reasoning, yet in practice the basic commitments he privileges are those of Roman-Catholic Thomism. By treating them as axiomatic rather than doctrinal...transforms a Catholic moral vision into what looks like a neutral starting point.
Disguises an apologetic project as pure philosophy.
“At the foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements the truth of which no further reason can be given.” ― Alasdair C. MacIntyre, After Virtue
The quote mentioned faith and philosophy by name, if the actual writings are more about religion than faith then i retract my statement.
Yup.
(Actually, I don't know how promptly they reckon fallen Christians will be revived.)
But some churches, like Jehovah's witnesses and adventists believe in the "soul sleep", so the soul sleeps until the second coming of Christ, then you are sent to either heaven or hell.
Of course, folk belief and desire for retribution being what they are, many SdA folks will tell you that that instant will "feel like eternity".
There's also a weird bit about how after Jesus returns and takes the righteous away with him Satan will rule the world for, like, a thousand years. That's expected to be pretty awful for everyone left behind - so, you know, don't you kids go swimming on Saturday - but it's intended to demonstrate, once and for all, that Jesus' way is the best way. (I admire the fair-minded impulse behind that narrative, like: gotta give Satan a shot!) After that, though (because obviously life with Satan in charge will be awful), God'll annihilate all them, and (if I recall correctly) all of the righteous, along with God and Jesus and all the angels, will move back to live on Earth.
Source: raised SdA.
(No idea what JWs have to say about any of this. I ask them very nicely not to bother me again, and they've always - the odd pamphlet through the letterbox apart - done so.)
> some churches ... believe ... the soul sleeps until the second coming of Christ, then you are sent to either heaven or hell.
It's nuanced and a lot of Christians don't catch the nuance, but the Bible speaks both of an immediate transfer of the soul to one place or the other upon death and also of an eventual resurrection (of all souls into bodies) at the second coming, followed by final judgement.