Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (The Paul Carus Lectures) by Alasdair MacIntyre

Author:Alasdair MacIntyre [MacIntyre, Alasdair]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9780812697056
Publisher: Open Court
Published: 1999-08-09T16:00:00+00:00

Just because our degree of success or failure in first acquiring and then practicing the virtues determines in significant measure what it is that we find agreeable and useful, the characterization of the virtues, in Humean terms, as qualities that are generally and naturally agreeable and useful is misleading. Consider the virtue of temperateness, the virtue concerned with the pleasures and pains of eating, drinking, sexuality, and other bodily activities and states. To have this virtue is not only to know how to avoid the extremes of self-indulgent and even addictive appetite, on the one hand, and of an unappreciative and insensitive puritanism on the other, but also to do so, as Aristotle remarked, with an eye to our own particular circumstances. What temperateness requires of an athlete in training is not what it requires of a convalescent whose strength needs to be rebuilt. What it requires of someone who is tempted to excess in eating is not the same as what it requires of someone whose vice is fanatical devotion to a cult of fitness and weight-loss.

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