Introduction to Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue

this video will be a very brief introduction to aleister mcintyre's after virtue and when i say very brief i do not mean the video itself will be brief i have no idea how long this video will be i mean that in relation to after virtue this video will be a very brief introduction the book after virtue by lester mcintyre is fairly long although i've seen longer and it's uh complex it's rich it's subtle there's a lot in it to talk about even a proper introduction to say nothing of a proper commentary would necessarily be extremely lengthy this is not what i would call a proper introduction just a very brief introduction it's going to give a few pointers on the text and introduce a few of the major claims of the text and some some aspects of the text claims aspects pointers just a few in each category now let's first understand the context of the book and there are several different angles we might consider we're looking at the context let's start with this one after virtue published in 1981 by notre dame university press by aleister mcintyre reinvigorated virtuous so what we're talking about here is different traditions in moral thought and different strategies for knowing the difference between right and wrong one strategy one tradition is deontology that's the strategy of knowing what's right by looking at intentions or motivations that's how you know the difference between a right action and a wrong action the right action is one done with the right intention and um what we're aiming at in deontology is satisfying our obligations that's the deontological tradition then there's the utilitarian tradition where what we're aiming at in morality is the greatest possible happiness and the way you know the difference between right and wrong action is by the results okay so uh those are two traditions in moral philosophy but virtue ethics is another one and in virtue ethics you know the difference between right and wrong primarily by knowing the character of a person the difference between a right action and a wrong action is the right action is the kind of action that's done by someone with good character that's that's what makes a right action that's how you can identify right action by looking at character and what we're aiming at in virtue ethics is to be happy human beings by being properly functioning human beings virtue is uh the the practices the way of life the state of being or the character that aligns human beings with their proper function now what mcintyre is doing in this book is reinvigorating this concept of proper function and by so doing reinvigorating virtue ethics basically english speaking philosophy for quite some time had been just a discussion between deontologists and utilitarians this book after virtue in 1981 changed the nature of the discussion by making um by making moral philosophy in the english speaking world at least now a discussion amongst dantologists utilitarians and now virtue ethicists as well this is the book that helps philosophy rediscover virtue ethics in the contemporary setting so mcintyre argues the early modern philosophy early modern philosophical project of trying to find a new kind of ethics without relying on this concept of proper function that this was all a project doomed to fail and there's my computer beeping and he will argue that moral statements are meaningful and this is an objection to a tradition called emotivism so with um with that in mind we'd better look first at um modern war philosophy and then more specifically at emotivism for two other aspects of the context of this remarkable book after virtue by aleister mcintyre 1981 so in an article called modern moral philosophy a philosopher named elizabeth anscombe argues that the entire moral project of modern philosophy makes no sense and it makes no sense because the modern moral philosophers were focusing on moral obligation and moral law they were using in anscombe's words a law conception of ethics now a law conception of ethics doesn't make a lot of sense without a moral law giver which pretty much have to be god and elizabeth anscombe we're still doing background of mcintyre here we're not talking about mcintyre directly elizabeth and anscombe in the article modern war philosophy introduction an introduction to which is available elsewhere on this channel anscombe argues that a law conception of ethics makes no sense without a moral law giver and these modern war philosophers did not rely on god in their ethics now their idea of moral law actually does come from the bible at least historically culturally but they did not appeal to the bible they did not appeal to god they did not base their idea of moral law or their their law conception of ethics on god and so it just didn't make a lot of sense and anscombe says if we are going to do ethics we'll need to go back to an aristotelian idea of ethics starting with a working understanding of the function of the human being anscombe doesn't go that far she just critiques the modern moral philosophical project of trying to establish an understanding of right versus wrong using a law conception of ethics and not employing the older heirs to two nadia of the proper function of the human being she critiques this modern project she says it doesn't make any sense it's a dismal failure these modern more philosophers kant and mill and all the rest just don't make a lot of sense and the whole project was doomed to fail if we're going to do moral philosophy at all we have to go back to something more aristotelian she stops there she doesn't go further that's modern moral philosophy by elizabeth anselmon earlier and very famous article so mcintyre starts where antscom stopped he gives a similar analysis of the history of philosophy and he says we need to go back to an aristotelian approach to ethics now he doesn't quite get there at least in this book what he does is he tries to reestablish the concept of the proper function of the human being so that we can then we can then get on with doing ethics properly he never quite gets at least in this book to the right account of human proper function and morality he just exposes the failure of modern moral philosophy introduces and defends the concept of proper function and argues that this concept is necessary to make sense of ethics giving a filler account of proper function filling in all the other moral concepts you know those ones that deontology and utilitarianism are also concerned with obligations and intentions and happiness and results filling in an account of morality by explaining all these other things in relation to human proper function is necessary but it's not something he does in this book he's just uh laying the groundwork he says all that for later uh you want to see what he might say about that read his other books now let's take one more third look now a third look one more look a third look at the context of mcintyre and then eventually we'll get to some observations on how this book begins and some of the things he does in the book third look at the context of mcintyre his biggest enemy is emotivism now emotivism is the theory that there is no such thing as a moral statement what we think of as moral statements are meaningless they're just expressions of emotivism uh sorry they are just expressions of emotion emotivism is the theory that moral claims are just expressions of emotion and they are really just expressions of emotion not they're motivated by emotion no they really are just emotional um emotional outbursts or um emotional emoting emotional release of emotions uh expressions of emotion there's no actual fact claim in a moral statement at all the claim stealing is wrong doesn't actually mean anything it's just an expression of my emotions about stealing that's all moral statements are according to emotivism so that that's a theory uh not in moral philosophy so much as about moral philosophy it's the theory that all claims made by moral philosophers are meaningless and that's the theory of emotivism and it's the biggest enemy of mcintyre mcintyre is helping us to rediscover moral philosophy and get it right this time which means well which means the theory that says moral philosophy doesn't actually give us any meaningful statements at all it's going to have to be pretty much his biggest enemy so emotivism is the theory that there is no such thing as a moral statement they're just expressions of emotion and it's the dominant meta-ethical theory of logical positivism logical positivism was dominant in english-speaking philosophy for a few decades in the early 1900s it's rooted in david hume's philosophy logical positivism said that every meaningful claim is either verifiable in sensory experience or is a necessarily true statement about how our ideas relate to one another like all bachelors are unmarried is a necessarily true statement because it's about um how the idea in our heads of bachelors relates to the idea of unmarried people and it's necessarily true because that's how we relate our ideas but no necessarily true statement like that is a statement about the world outside the mind and if you have any familiarity with uh the background of hume then you might see where this is coming from this is all just uh an outworking of hume's fork from uh part five part four and then part five of the inquiry concerning human understanding so uh there's more on that go to the philosophers in their own words playlist the great text playlist on this channel to find the background on hume so anyway hume had this philosophy of well really a philosophy of language that was articulated more carefully by these logical positivists who said every meaningful sentence is either like that not really about the world outside the mind but necessarily true because it's about how our ideas relate to one another or or it's verifiable in sensory experience every meaningful statement not every true statement not every warranted statement every meaningful statement while also true and warranted because all true and warranted statements have meaning they can't be true or warranted unless they have meaning but a claim like this about meaningful statements is much more ambitious than example about warranted or true statements a the claim by the logical positivist is that a statement not counting those necessarily true statements about our ideas a statement which is meaningful is one which is verifiable in sensory experience and that means every single statement that does not appear to be verifiable in sensory experience is meaningless interestingly famously infamously this includes statements like god exists and indeed statements like god does not exist any form of religion plus actually strictly speaking atheism are all meaningless positions so i'm fond of pointing out that um right whereas an ordinary atheist will deny the existence of god the logical positivists deny the existence of christians and muslims and atheists now logical positivism as a tradition in philosophy is dead it it turns out it was not a correct philosophy of language it turns out it was flawed and under the influence of characters like wittgenstein in his later writings uh karl popper of thomas kuhn of quine in his two dogmas of empiricism and under the influence of the fact that it was just not a good philosophy of language um there's something bertrand russell points out that um is in a video in the articles in contemporary philosophy playlist that you can consult if you're interested for that reason and all those other reasons the influence of all these other people and more reasons logical positivism was a flop it was totally dominant in english-speaking philosophy or at least uh in in philosophy departments at the fancy universities in the english-speaking world logical positivism was the reigning philosophy for a while and now it's pretty much dead but logical positivism spawned the theory of emotivism and emotivism had enormous cultural influence and this influence is still with us the influence of logical positivism has long outlived logical positivism itself now mcintyre in the book after virtue tells a big story about the history of western philosophy but also about the history of modern culture like i said it's a complex and a subtle book after virtue cannot be reduced to just a few claims about morality or the history philosophy it's also a book about culture and about more he tells a big story about the history of modern culture and he says modern culture is thoroughly infected with emotivism for example people act as if emotivism is true they treat the choice between moral perspectives as if it's based merely on personal preference or they act as if moral perspectives are entirely subjective think about when a politician says i'm personally opposed to abortion or something like that but i'm not going to impose my preferences on others uh now i i suppose maybe there's a politician somewhere who really is just personal personally opposed and means it but think of the think of the catholic politician who says i am personally opposed to abortion uh as a catholic but i'm not going to pose my preferences and others well uh according to the actual catholic teaching the very meaning of the catholic teaching it's wrong fact fact fact you can carve out some exceptions for the the ectopic pregnancy scenario and things like that but um or maybe just that i'm not sure there are any other exceptions uh the catholicism could recognize but um uh abortion setting aside such an exception is wrong fact fact fact that's the actual meaning of the catholic teaching on the subject but a politician who says as a catholic i personally pose abortion but i'm not going to impose my preferences on others is treating his his allegedly catholic perspective on morality as if it's just a personal preference as if it's not a claim about a moral fact but as it's just how he feels about something now mcintyre thinks this is a terrible situation the the fact that people act as if emotivism is true is a very serious cultural problem it's it's dreadful but it's also a consequence of the total failure of modern moral theory modern moral theory and modern culture are as it turns out filled with moral concepts concepts like happiness intentions motives results obligations duties filled with more concepts human rights but none of these concepts even makes any sense without the concept of human proper function as the the foundation of a moral perspective modern morris philosophy abandoned this foundational concept the concept of human proper function the result was a few centuries of philosophical confusion with the modern moral philosophers who couldn't make a lot of sense of ethics and then the the present disastrous cultural situation where where sorry i'm just trying to clear my head and organize some notes where an entire civilization does not even understand the meaning of moral concepts and sometimes acts as if moral claims do not have any meaning at all let me rephrase that an entire civilization does not understand the meaning of its own moral concepts and sometimes acts as if it's moral concepts do not have any meaning at all that's what happens when you take the foundational concept that is necessary to make sense of all the other moral concepts the foundational concept being the proper functioning of the human being and you remove it you try to do ethics with all the remaining concepts without the foundation without the thing that gives life to them that makes sense of them all you're going to be left with is confusion first a couple of centuries of confused moral philosophy and then the result any a culture infected with emotivism that doesn't even understand the meaning of moral concepts and acts as if they don't have any meaning at all now i said mcintyre tells a big story about the history of modern western philosophy i think i should mention at this point that i think his big story is very interesting very insightful mostly correct but not correct in all details now let's be fair to mcintyre it is a remarkable thing to tell a big story about the history of philosophy and the people who do it best among whom i count mcintyre are going to be very insightful but they're likely to make some mistakes in the details i don't think mcintyre was entirely fair to john locke i don't think he understood kierkegaard properly and i have my doubts whether he was entirely fair and accurate in his analysis of content mill as well but leaving that aside his big story the history of modern western philosophy is nevertheless magnificent it is well in my judgment even if it's not right in all the particulars it's still very insightful and it's largely correct um it's maybe maybe correct as a generalization or an approximation even if it's not correct in all the details but it's also very very interesting and i've just given you some of the background i'll probably uh some some of the story itself i'll probably i'll probably say a little more about it uh later on in this video so now let's start talking about the first chapter of after virtue and his his magnificent analogy for uh this story he tells about the history of modern moral philosophy mcintyre suggests that there's been a catastrophe in our understanding of morality rather like the catastrophe in our understanding of science that happens in certain science fiction stories now we're thinking in particular here of the book a canticle for leibowitz by walter miller let me let me just double check that yes it's uh canticle for leibowitz by walter miller so in this this other truly remarkable book a canticle for lebroids by walter miller we had a nuclear holocaust and the first third of the book i believe the title of it is um fiat homo latin for let there be man the first third of the book features the the catholic monks after the nuclear holocaust in what we could call uh for lack of a better term the dark ages the new dark ages the catholic monks after the holocaust who are among the very few guiding lights of the new humanity or the humanity that has um that is trying to rise out of the ashes of the nuclear holocaust and science is completely lost the next door of the book we're still in the canticle for liberates by walter miller next third of the book is um fiat looks let there be light and this features a later generation where the same the same monks or the um the the philosophical theological descendants of the same mugs not not the biological descendants of course the um the descendants of the monks are rediscovering learning they're rediscovering the old science not that they weren't interested in the first third of the book but now they've made some real progress they're they're rediscovering the learning the science that had made the old modern world but they don't know what they're doing they don't understand scientific theory properly now the third the third part of the book is uh something i i will leave for another time and i'll just recommend reading a canticle for leibowitz by walter miller because it's a truly magnificent book i won't describe the rest of the book it doesn't come into the description of mcintyre so let's let's go back to mcintyre okay so um i was talking about canticle for leiboits to to bring into perspective mcintyre's illustration so in this in this science fiction world as mcintyre explains science has been lost it was blamed for some serious catastrophes it was banned books were burned scientists were lynched and science was lost and then later the scholars start rediscovering science but they don't have a proper understanding of the scientific method no one taught it to them it had been in books that were burned so what do they they have fragments they have charred remains of old physics textbooks they have scribblings of notes from some old scientists and they have partial books again chart of biology and and biographies of scientists and so on and what do they do when they've lost track of what the scientific method actually is they don't even know how science is done they don't know what science itself is all they have is these poorly understood fragments of scientific theory records of scientific discussion and different scientists without understanding any of the principles that made it actual science you know scientific method in particular what's the state of their knowledge of science they have some theories that are not actually science but they think they're doing science when they study those theories they might memorize the periodic table they might divide into camps where one person follows well let's say newton and someone else follows einstein or something like that but they don't understand properly the scientific method that's supposed to be used to distinguish between the two to figure out who's right and so on they think they're doing science but all they have is fragments all they have is a few concepts that don't even make any sense anymore without the central foundational concept the scientific method that's now been lost they think they're doing science but they're not and they don't even know what they don't know they don't know they don't know science in this science fictional world now mcintyre says this is pretty much what's happened with modern war philosophy the lost scientific method in the canticle for leibowitz scenario is the lost concept of human proper function for modern moral philosophy in the canticle for liberate scenario scientific method was abandoned or lost destroyed forgotten and then people rediscovered what they thought was science but all they had was bits and pieces fragments separated from the central foundational concept that made sense of the fragments they tried to work with the fragments they were doing something interesting but it wasn't science modern moral philosophy the concept of human proper function was abandoned thrown away we tried to do ethics without it uh characters like descartes for a start and the the fragments of moral thought that remained did not make any sense without their central foundational concept and so they thought they were doing more philosophy they thought they were studying morality but they weren't they were just studying some disconnected uh confused jumbles of ideas that didn't even make any sense because they only did properly make sense as moral philosophy in context of the idea of human proper function just as all the theories and experimentation and debates all the questions and all the proposed answers in science don't even make sense as science without the fundamental concept of the scientific method so these modern warfare philosophers don't even realize they're not doing moral philosophy anymore without the concept of proper function they're not doing more philosophy properly and they don't even realize it because they don't realize that they've abandoned the only concept that makes moral philosophy work so moral philosophy starting with more or less descartes more philosophy starting with the modern era is to aristotelian pre-modern moral philosophy what uh science or pseudoscience uh science pseudoscience in the post-nuclear holocaust scenario and canticle for libroids what that sort of science is to science before that what that sort of science is to science now in the real world so that's the interesting illustration we don't know what moral philosophy is anymore and we don't even know we don't know it and the reason it's all so confusing the reason people have interminable moral disagreements you know the reason um we can't get past our stupid trolley problems is because we're dealing with moral concepts that don't even make any sense because we've abandoned the concept that made sense of all the other ones and if we want to make any sense out of morality we'll have to go back we'll have to go back the way we came and rediscover that central concept that makes it all work human proper function there's a nice line in c.s lewis somewhere about how um uh sometimes the only way to progress is to go backwards uh you you say you're trying to climb a mountain or something you've worked yourself in up to where you can't get any further because there's an impossible cliff you have to go back and take the correct course you can get closer to the goal uh by moving directly towards it after you get back on the right path you have to go backwards in order to progress sometimes this is um something lewis says but this is very much uh in keeping i think with what mcintyre is is talking about so the catastrophe of modern moral philosophy is that we have lost the concept of human proper function now let me give you some tips on the objections to emotivism and uh and then we'll get back to the concept of proper function again i suppose maybe then we'll be able to wrap up this video moral thinking today is heavily influenced by emotivism which is a symptom of the moral catastrophe modern civilization is undergone now i believe you will find more than one objection to emotivism in the book after virtue if you study it but here's just one mainly as a as a tip as a useful philosophy hack here is here is an objection to emotivism from chapter two that mcentire gives if moral statements express emotions what sort of emotions do they express so um aj air representing logical positivism and touting emotivism and if my memory serves maybe chapter six of his book language truth and logic uh don't don't quote me that's somewhere in language truth and logic aj air a y e r ajr representing logical positivism touts the emotivist theory i think it was chapter six but again don't quote me on that and uh air said that these emotions that are expressed in what we think of as moral claims are moral emotions there are no moral claims he says but we think of his moral claims or just expressions of emotions what sort of emotions well ajr says their moral emotions well mcintyre says if moral statements if what looks like moral statements are not really statements but just expressions of emotions what sort of emotions are they and if you take that approach and say their moral emotions you haven't explained anything a claim like stealing is wrong purports to express some value concept emotivists say that such claim does not actually express a value concept it just expresses an emotion and strictly speaking it's not even a claim at all but these emotions have any well i i would say any meaning any content but you know logical positivism says they don't if these emotions can be distinguished as any particular kind of emotion such that we can use them to describe what a moral claim or a claim that appears to be a moral claim a sentence like stealing is wrong what a sentence like that is supposed to express if we take the logical positive route and try to describe uh the genesis of a sentence like stealing is wrong as not having any meaning but just expressing emotions and if we're going to be able to do that we ought to be able to say what sort of emotion this is what kind of emotion is behind these these moral sentences either these emotions express some more fundamental concept of value in which case there's still a concept of value in which case they said it's like stealing is wrong probably still has meaning or or they don't in which case we're left with no explanation whatsoever uh what sort of um concept what sort of uh concept behind our emotions could possibly cause these statements that we think are moral statements uh let me let me let me just try to summarize this emotivism fails to describe value claims as anything other than what they purport to be a claim like stealing is wrong purports to be a claim about values and emotivism says it's not it says it's just an expression of emotion but unless you can come up with some explanation that no one has ever come up with yet for what sort of emotion that might be without making it into a moral emotion in which case those sentences are still going to be just what they purport to be value claims fact claims maybe inaccurate fact claims some moral claims are wrong but that claims nonetheless either that or they're going to be written off as emotions that don't express any value claims in which case nothing has been explained you've tried to explain mcintyre can say to the to the emotivist you've tried to explain moral claims as statements of emotion but you can't say what kind of emotion without resorting to some more fundamental concept of morality in which case moral claims or claims are still to go moral claims still work so that's my attempt to introduce one of his objections to emotivism from chapter two now let's say something about chapter five chapter five is a good passage to go to to understand the um the precise nature of the modern moral catastrophe so let me state it although i probably redundantly because i think i've already said this in this video the concepts of pre-modern moral philosophy included all the major ones it included intentions and obligations and motives intentions and motives and obligations and results and happiness and human nature human proper function and character and more but the modern war philosophers took this concept of human proper function and set it aside for reasons maybe we can discuss some other time i don't think i'll get into it in this video there are reasons they're very interesting reasons this was done but the modern war philosophers set that concept aside human proper function and tried to do moral philosophy with the remaining concepts those are the only components of modern moral philosophy but in pre-modern moral philosophy the aristotel and tradition roughly from plato to aristotle although mcintyre doesn't focus on plato so much roughly from that actually it goes back before roughly at least socrates to air to what did i say plato aristotle roughly from socrates to aquinas from socrates to aquinas all of those concepts were together intentions motives obligations results happiness and character and proper function were all there and human proper function was the fundamental concept in light of which we could understand all the others that was pre-modern war philosophy modern war philosophy took away the foundational one and just had the remaining jumble of concepts with no way of making sense of them the remaining ideas were incoherent and that led to the confusion that was modern moral philosophy and its complete failure to come up with any account of morality that everyone could agree on or that even made a whole lot of sense and that led to these interminable debates between people like the deontologists versus people like the utilitarians and to the cultural disaster of an emotivist philosophy and a culture that acts like emotivism is true all of this was the result of tossing out the proper function concept that made morality that made moral thinking work all right so what do we do we go back to the concept the proper function and this allows us to get a lot from an is here is one more and maybe this will be just about the final introductory uh insight on after virtue by aleister mcintyre mcintyre says you can get an ought for many is the modern moral thought modern moral philosophy the modern moral philosophers thought that you cannot get an ought from an is from an au statement sorry from an is statement you can't get an odd statement from statements of facts statement about statements about what is you cannot derive an ought statement a statement about what should be you can't get a statement about what is good you can't get in general a value statement from statements about what simply is modern moral philosophers may sometimes have tried they failed more more often they would just say you can't do it so you have to establish morality on some other grounds than facts so mcintyre says that's all rubbish you can get a knot from an is from is statements you can easily get an odd statement mcintyre cites some counter examples to the noat from his principle here's one silas is a gardener therefore it would be good for silas to water the plants silas as a gardener is a fact statement and it would be good for him to water the plants is a value statement that actually follows from that fact statement very simple here's here's one i'll use my cell phone always reigns when people call me their voices are clear when i hear them over the phone it never drops any calls all fact statements value statement that follows from them this is a good cell phone mcintyre gives a description of his watch he says this is a maybe it's hypothetical maybe he wasn't talking about the watch he personally was wearing i don't remember if he specifies it as his own watch but it's a great example we'll we'll present it here as his own watch mcintyre's example my watch i i don't have one i just the pocket watch cell phone thing my watch doesn't lose more than one second every 10 years it keeps virtually perfect timing and it's very durable and it looks nice these are all fact statements maybe you'll quibble with the it looks nice statement so set that aside if you like it only just one second every 10 years fact statement it's very durable it's difficult to break it even if you drop it from some height give some more fact statements like this if you like what follows from these this is a good watch this is a great watch that's a value statement you can evaluate the watch based on the facts now what makes this work what makes this work is functional concepts and mcintyre says a functional concept is a concept that describes a thing that has a proper function like a cell phone a computer a car or let's rewind to examples from plato's dialogues where socrates talks about this stuff how about an eye this thing has the function of seeing this thing has the function of grasping here's here's my my damaged baylor university teacup the lid's gone so um it doesn't work so well as a teacup actually it would it just would be uh difficult to grasp when the tea is super hot but right now i'm using it as a as a holder for pencils and pens and whatnot anyway uh functions very well as that and would still function somewhat well as a teacup but let's talk about the hand what's the function of the hand well maybe lots of things but among other things it can grasp this your teacup that's the proper function of the hand and a hand has a proper function well you know what else is a proper function a human being has a proper function so says social socrates so says aristotle and so says mcintyre and this was the idea that animated moral philosophy from that time until aquinas and a little after and until the modern philosophers abandoned the concept of human proper function and try to do ethics without it and failed pathetically so you can get an ought statement from an if statement you'll get a value statement from a set of fact statements when the fact statements concern something that has a proper function when the fact statements involve a functional concept now you might object that you're still getting an auth statement from a not statement to which i uh maybe represent mcintyre but representing my own working opinions at any rate that are informed by mcintyre i can say how is that an objection we're getting an auth statement from an is statement if the is statement already includes some evaluations of what is a proper function for something so what the point is it's an is statement you can get bought statements from is statements maybe not from purely as statements but who cares the point is you can state some facts and draw an evaluation from the facts i think that's the crucial point and actually the crucial point is that fact statements and value statements that's the even more fundamental point maybe fact statements and value statements overlap in venn diagram terms there is something in the middle there are fact statements that are value statements like it's good for gardner to water the plants or it's good for a watch to not lose more than one second in 10 years or it's good for a cell phone to never drop calls or it's good for a human being to have the virtues the descriptions of virtue and people like aristotle are descriptions of human proper function and it's that concept of human proper function that motivates well more than motivates that organizes it gives meaning to all these other moral concepts so modern war philosophy now let's summarize everything modern war philosophy abandoned functional concepts concerning human beings this made evaluation of human behavior hopelessly confused but functional concepts do make sense functional concepts can be used to make clear factual and easily understood evaluations and we need functional concepts to make sense of ethics and we still can use functional concepts to make sense of ethics and that's what mcintyre says we should do now he doesn't go as far as actually doing it in any kind of detail in this book he just spends the whole book while doing the stuff i've described here and probably doing some other stuff i don't have time to describe or never understood in the first place because um am i i have my limits uh i have my there are limits to my mental capacity i i won't pretend to have understood this this rich book fully it's a book vast in scope and detail and mcintyre goes over these matters and more in this magnificent book after virtue but he never goes as far as to finish the job he's telling us what sort of job we need to do and explaining how we got here um for a ridiculous analogy that might work it's sort of like the council of elrond he's explaining how we got here and what needs to be done but he doesn't finish the job not not in this particular book he does mention by the way that we will need to update our understanding of human nature and of human proper function in light of anything we've learned since aristotle well or since aquinas in the areas of metaphysics and science you can't take the the science of aristotle which informs aristotle's concept of human nature which is um not entirely an accurate set of theories in science and use that to inform a concept of human nature now we ought to have a concept of human nature that's informed by everything we've learned including some things from modern science so mcintyre doesn't say we just go back to aristotle as such we go back to the aristotelian methodology the concept of human proper function is the concept that makes morality make sense and without it we are living in a world after virtue in a world that doesn't make any sense a world that doesn't know how to make any sense of morality and this is very very bad we need to go back the way we have come and rediscover the concept of human proper function thus does alice there macintyre after virtue 1981. you

Channel: TeacherOfPhilosophy

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Keywords: Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, virtue ethics, ethics, aristotelianism, natural law theory

Id: B5oIe3RiIC4

Length: 41min 13sec (2473 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 22 2021