BOOKS
ARISTOTLE OR NIETZSCHE?
AFTER VIRTUE: A STUDY IN MORAL THEORY.
By
Alasdalr Mac·
Intyre.
University of Notre Dame Press. $7.95.
This is an extremely rare work - a book on moral philoso–
phy which is actually exciting to read . The thesis is startling and
very ambitious. MacIntyre claims that the difficulties of contem–
porary moral philosophy spring from something in the nature of a
historical catastrophe: the loss of the context in which alone our
moral discourse would have coherent meaning. What we find now
are mere fragments of an erstwhile coherent idiom, which we no
longer understand. And this is why our moral philosophy is in such
disorder.
There are two main symptoms of this disorder. The first is the
rise of what I might call subjectivist doctrines of ethics. MacIntyre
takes emotivism as the emblematic example. These hold that our
moral positions cannot be justified by any objective order but are
ultimately simply expressions of our desires, or emotions, or of ar–
bitrary decisions on our part. This is a doctrine hard to hold in
coherent form because the very nature of moral claims is to imply
that there is some standard independent of the desires or decisions of
the speaker. The second symptom is the "insoluble" character of
many modern debates (MacIntyre cites the disputes about abortion,
just wars, principles of distributive justice), in which rival, incom–
mensurable views square off against each other (e .g., instances of
right versus right.)
The contest whose loss so reduces our moral discourse is many–
faceted, but MacIntyre singles out what he takes to be the most im–
portant strand in it, the Aristotelian tradition. Its importance for
him is not simply an historical matter- though it is true that Aris–
totelian conceptions of ethics in some sense dominated the scene in
early modern Europe; it is that he believes this tradition to offer a
correct conception of ethical discourse.
What modern understandings of morality lack , since the over–
throw of the Aristotelian outlook, is an understanding of the good
life, a
le/os
or purpose which could be seen as grounded in human
nature. This was the necessary objective background against which
