VIRTUE IN PRACTICE: ALASDAIR MACINTYRE'S CONCEPT OF VIRTUE (original) (raw)

Alasdair MacIntyre has been at the forefront of the resurging interest in virtue theory. His seminal work After Virtue provided a tremendous impulse in this direction. First published in 1981, it proposes a return to Aristotle amid the incommensurability and fragmentation of contemporary moral theory. Since After Virtue, MacIntyre has maintained his central proposals, while his candid openness to criticism has led to revisions of many aspects of his theory. The goal of this dissertation is principally to answer the following question: how does MacIntyre’s unique understanding of virtue, particularly situated within his concept of practice, both solve the problem of moral incommensurability and withstand key objections that have been leveled against it? To achieve this, the structure of this work will be divided into three parts. The first part will deal with a conceptual analysis of the term practice which is central to MacIntyre’s understanding of virtue, that is, with the problem that practice seeks to provide a response to, its key elements, and a look at its philosophical-historical sources. As the focus of this section will be primarily on MacIntyre’s early work, one will discover that After Virtue was indeed a long time in the making, offering a comprehensive solution to the problems and questions which MacIntyre has always been concerned with. The second part will seek to offer the heart of MacIntyre’s proposal of the nature of the virtues in After Virtue, following the three stages that MacIntyre lays out in defining virtue, namely, within practice, within the narrative unity of an individual life, and within a moral tradition. The final step will be analyze a few of the key critiques that have been made regarding the limitations and implications of defining virtue within practice. In light of these objections, the possibility of an adequate response and solution will also be explored. In this respect, one must keep in mind that MacIntyre has continued to develop the concept of virtue in his later works in two crucial ways. First, he explains the intimate relation between a theory of practical reasoning and a theory of the virtues in his work Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Second, he shows how to become an independent practical reasoner through virtues of acknowledged dependence which serves to unite his theory to a biological understanding of man. This is treated in his work Dependent Rational Animals, and is an important clarification to his well-known critique of Aristotle’s metaphysical biology. This itinerary, in short, is meant to lead to a greater understanding of what MacIntyre means by defining virtue in practice, how the concept practice originated, and how this theory has developed and withstood diverse objections. The final hope is to offer prospective directions that this theory can take in order to achieve greater theoretical consistency and force.