After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory by Alasdair MacIntyre

Author:Alasdair MacIntyre
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Ethics, Philosophy
ISBN: 9780268035044
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 1981-08-30T04:00:00+00:00

Aristotle's Account of the Virtues

Any attempt to treat Aristotle's account of the virtues from the standpoint which I have adopted presents me with an initial problem. On the one hand he is the protagonist against whom I have matched the voices of liberal modernity; so that I am clearly committed to giving his own highly specific account of the virtues a central place. On the other hand I have already made it clear that I want to regard him not just as an individual theorist, but as the representative of a long tradition, as someone who articulates what a number of predecessors and successors also articulate with varying degrees of success. And to treat Aristotle as part of a tradition, even as its greatest representative, is a very unAristotelian thing to do.

Aristotle of course recognized that he had predecessors. Indeed he tried to write the history of previous philosophy is such a way that it culminated with his own thought. But he envisaged the relationship of that thought to those precedessors in terms of the replacement of their errors or at least partial truths by his comprehensively true account. From the standpoint of truth, on Aristotle's own view, once his work had been done, theirs could be discarded without loss. But to think in this way is to exclude the notion of a tradition of thought, at least as I intend it. For it is central to the conception of such a tradition that the past is never something merely to be discarded, but rather that the present is intelligible only as a commentary upon and response to the past in which the past, if necessary and if possible, is corrected and transcended, yet corrected and transcended in a way that leaves the present open to being in turn corrected and transcended by some yet more adequate future point of view. Thus the notion of a tradition embodies a very unAristotelian theory of knowledge according to which each particular theory or set of moral or scientific beliefs is intelligible and justifiable-insofar as it is justifiable-only as a member of an historical series. It is scarcely necessary to say that in such a series the later is not necessarily superior to the earlier; a tradition may cease to progress or may degenerate. But when a tradition is in good order, when progress is taking place, there is always a certain cumulative element to a tradition. Not everything in the present is equally liable to be overthrown in the future, and some elements of present theory or belief may be such that it is difficult to envisage their being abandoned without the tradition as a whole being discarded. So it is for example in our present-day scientific tradition with the account of the relationship between cells and molecules in contemporary biochemistry; and so it is with Aristotle's account of some central virtues within the classical tradition.

Aristotle's importance therefore can only be specified in terms of a kind of tradition whose existence he himself did not and could not have acknowledged.

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