MacIntyre Ethics

Alasdair MacIntyre is a critic of modern morality. He believes that in our modern culture we have shaken loose of the Aristotelian-Christian worldview, and we have not been provided by anything from the Enlightenment that takes its place to fill in the gaps where rational versus non-rational discourse about morality is concerned. Our past, according to MacIntyre, is narrative and story, suspect for the moral conclusions made, but a necessary part of our modern interpretation of morality because we remain conscious of past human life. Because of a lack of any universal, homogenous moral theory that allows us to validly answer moral debates one way or another, MacIntyre feels that our modern system of ethics is no more than the arbitrary will of people imposing their arbitrary preferences upon others. This can certainly be seen in the areas of abortion and gay rights as moral dilemmas in our modern culture:

Since moral norms had come loose from their moorings in an Aristotelian-Christian worldview, and since the Enlightenment had provided no effective substitutes-that is, no warrants that could resolve moral debates-people have been molding moral convictions simply on the basis of arbitrary personal preferences, manifesting their will to power. Thus, the various forms of emotivism are reinterpreted; they should not be seen as theories of moral discourse and belief but merely as a reflection of the g

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will, (often dependent on what ideological perspective we adopt), as opposed to the one that is chosen because it is a universal “good” for all. To the positivist like the emotivist, only science can provide clear-cut, evidence or proof for any number of claims that may be made. Ethics is normative, however, so it is not seen as a science. Rather, normative words like good, evil, bad, right or wrong are emotional feelings and sentiments to the positivist. These types of moral judgments can never be made with any kind of certainty based on fact. Rather, to positivists, like C.L. Stevenson, if sentences and expressions that use these types of emotive terms have any meaning whatsoever, it is only an emotional meaning, “Normative sentences, those which say what ought to be done, are the special province of ethics. However, being neither confirmable by experience nor true by definition, they must be looked upon as literally meaningless expressions; if they have any meaning, as they seem to have, it must be an emotive meaning,” (Denis and Peterfreund, 1992: 334). In After Virtue, MacIntyre takes umbrage to the beliefs and work of Stevenson and other positivists. He does this because he argues that the emotivist recognizes th
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Approximate Word count = 3905
Approximate Pages = 16 (250 words per page)