In turn, without a unified goal, any notion of justice within society remains muddled and unclear. There is no common substantive goal for which society works, rather it operates toward the preservation of each citizen’s pursuit of his or her own interests. Such societies are governed by “a set of institutional arrangements for imposing a bureaucratized unity” in the absence of possible moral consensus (254). In building his argument, MacIntyre carries out the effects of modern individualism into modern societies and attributes the lack of substantive moral unity to the fact that society has become “a collection of strangers, each pursuing his or her own interests under minimal constraints” (251). Narrative history is the basic genre for all characterization of human actions (208).
Rather, each person is housed within a particular narrative or history. In this sense, the notion of a modern “individual” as a rational, independent agent is a myth. He writes, “What I am therefore, is in key part what I inherit, a specific past that is present to some degree in my present” (221). MacIntyre asserts that all reason emerges from a living tradition in fact human self-knowledge also emerges from somewhere. Additional salient points emerge as MacIntyre unfolds this task further. Thus, MacIntyre suggests that the teleological unity of an Aristotelian tradition provides the necessary alternative to liberal individualism.
MacIntyre looks to the Aristotelian virtue tradition as one in which virtue remains encompassed within the narrative unity of a human life evidenced in practices learned together with a community unified by a shared vision of the good (258). Their moral lack arises as a result of a society’s denial or neglect of its own narrative history and the impetus to fragment persons from their historical narrative and community for the perpetuation of the individualist modern myth. In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre takes to the task of exposing modern liberal societies, born out of Enlightenment individualism, as morally vacuous. Congregational Research and DevelopmentĪfter Virtue, by Alasdair MacIntyre Book Review Title: After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theology, 2nd Edition Author: Alasdair MacIntyre Publisher: Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984 Reviewer: Nell Becker Sweeden.School of Theology Center for Practical Theology
0 kommentar(er)
