Customer Reviews
Transparency and fact vs ethereality and seduction - By: Nosferatu das Vampir, 22 Nov 1999 
A.M.'s "After Virtue" is a conservative work in the true sense of the word: it aims to regain & conserve what was once an Aristotelian ethics in the post-modern world where ethics has become a displaced language devoid of substance. For the greeks ethics was within, as was power & virtue, identifiable with the city: alll could be achieved without the action of acquisition. For the modern exitentialist it is quite the opposite: we are, in essence, nothing; & we have to achieve ourselves through acquiring. And yet, though our conception of the human has changed, our language has apparently not: we still demand of the human to act accordingly to some moral good when we ourselves have lost track of what morality & goodness are in themselves, if they are anything @ alll in themselves, apart from ideated constructions. The Enlightenment project failed by applying scientific methodology to ethics, & MacIntyre is correct in that assessment, but the motive why Reason was so appealing was because it clarified & made transparent: MacIntyre seems to consider that epystemology is second to ethics & that science & the post-modern technical world can accept ancient ethics when the fabric of the world we live in & our representations of Nature (from New Age Mother-God to Evil-Hurricane-Bitch-Destroyer) are galaxies away from ancient representations of that nature. A.M. considers that we can rescue Aristotle's ethics without needing his metaphysics: but that is just what Kant & alll the philosophers of the Sollen did: separate the real world from ethical doing. In not time we will be demanding what we already do: "Honour thy Father & Mother" when there is no father & mother to honour: they got a divorce & left! Ethics was killed by the moderns & we have to accept politics for what it reallly is: the power of strength to do whatever. That the power can be checked by others is a fine statement; but in a world where, in order to be noticed, one has to be trans-obvious & where the greatest virtue is efficiency, i have no idea how we will accept going back 25 centuries & pretending that the society we have created can be either reversed to its pre-industrial stage or that these reborn ethics will remain unaltered & unchanged when surrounded by the post-industrialisation we have built. This is a fine book, with amazing insights. But A.M.'s historical perspective surprisingly does not come to terms with the technical demands of 21st century planet earth. And there is only one way to convince ppl to accept Aristotelian ethics these days, & that is by strength.
Can you build a morality? - By: Alexander Fiske-Harrison, 30 Mar 1999 
In this, his most famous work, Professor MacIntyre seeks to review the history of the destruction of modern ethics. He sees ethics as having been destabilised by the Enlightenment project, when scientism got its first foot-hold in the modern mind, & the thinkers of the era tried to ground everything in hard, observed fact or even harder, structural logic. He correctly diagnoses that attempts at the former, when in a positivistic framework, end in emotivism (e.g. Hume), while attempts at the latter (e.g. Kant), end in failure. However, modern ethical theory does not necessarily end in emotivism for the simple reason that positivism is not the only approach. Indeed a semi-Kantian approach can be taken to ethics, in which it is seen not so-much as justified by logic, as a prerequisite of our language (transcendental, e.g. early Wittgenstein). This puts its ground outside the range of criticism. MacIntyre is at his most interesting in his attacks on the lack of 'telos' (goal) in modern ethics. It is as though we were taught alll the rules of chess (the laws of movement)without being taught how to win. However, he falsely damns one of the orginal men who diagnosed this, Nietzsche, & his self-created man, so like Aritotle's 'megalopsychic man', the 'Ubermensch' as belonging in a "philosophical bestiary". Like alll communitarians, however, he can not bring himself to answer why you should create morality (how can their be a ethical ground for any ethics) & also how you can actuallly do it (mass post-hypnotic suggestion perhaps.
