Pursuit of Virtue (Theoretical Research on Morality)

Author: Alasdair MacIntyre
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-12-01
Features: In this book, MacIntyre starts from the moral chaos of modern society and conducts a comprehensive examination and reflection on Western moral concepts and the spirit of the entire modernity. It is a work on the history of ethical thought, as well as a profound critique of the fundamental dynamics and assumptions of Western civilization. The strength and ambition of its arguments, along with its emphasis on the life of virtue, powerfully pushed the contemporary ethics from meta-ethics to substantive ethics, making it not only a "turning point in the study of contemporary ethics" but also a focal point of intense debate in the intellectual world over the past three decades. Since the 1950s, MacIntyre has relentlessly attacked meta-ethics since Moore through his extensive writings. His important works, After Virtue (1981), Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990), have promoted the revival of Aristotelian virtue ethics in the contemporary era by tracing the roots of Western modernity. MacIntyre argues that in the modern world defined by enlightenment, any effort to justify any moral claim for any reason is doomed to fail. This leads to the vacuity of moral discourse and practice in the contemporary world: although the language and appearance of morality still exist, its substance no longer does. The only purpose of moral language is control. This book has inspired philosophical research on virtue, revitalized traditionalist and communitarian thought, and sparked valuable debates in the history of moral philosophy. After Virtue deserves the attention of philosophers, historians, and anyone interested in moral philosophy and its history.