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different claims to good and right could be assessed; and it was what
allowed different moral principles to be couched in commensurable
language, and in some way arbitrated . The two symptoms of our
present disorder bespeak its loss.
Macintyre sees much of modern (post-seventeenth century),
moral philosophy as an attempt to make good this loss, using the
means to hand. But these are necessarily too meager to make up for
it. Once we reject the teleological notion of the good life, we are left ,
on one hand, with men as they are, and on the other, with the free
subject, capable of choosing his own ends, uncowed by the false
prestige of Nature . The concentration on the first , that is, on men's
passions and desires as they are, has given us various forms of util–
itarian theory, and has led some writers to see the basic problem of
ethics as how to avoid egoism. The concentrations on the second
have given us theories of rational will, of which the most influential
has been Kant's. But both kinds of theory are, in Macintyre's view,
manifestly inadequate to the task of justifying objective standards of
right. The growing recognition of this inadequacy has contributed to
the rise of subjectivist doctrines, such as the emotivism which suc–
ceeded the precious and etiolated doctrines of G. E. Moore and
Bloomsbury, and more robustly, the cataclysmic fury of Nietzsche.
In a sense, the issue about morality could be put starkly as: Aristotle
or Nietzsche?
But Macintyre's discussion is much richer than I have been
suggesting. For it is not only carried on at the level of ethical theories
and their metaphysical underpinnings. He also wants to show how
moral doctrines presuppose a characteristic kind of social back–
ground. Thus the world where moral subjectivism becomes domi–
nant, the world in which the moral subject floats free of any objective
context of the good, is also the world in which large areas of social
relations are given over to manipulation, and in which a certain
aesthetic view of the individual as a free consumer of lifestyles is
prevalent.
It
is no accident that the era of the bureaucratic manager
and the aesthete is the one where subjectivist doctrines are professed
by philosophers, and the writings of Sartre and Nietzsche begin to
impinge on the edges of popular culture.
Virtually the whole second half of the book deals with Macin–
tyre's reconstruction of the Aristotelian tradition, and there he
rewrites in a sense his
Short History of Ethics,
weaving together an ac–
count of social change and of the rise and development of moral
