The resulting moral relativism undercuts our ability to agree on the requisite premises for moral debate, as well as to collectively imagine and enact solutions to moral quandaries. When claims about moral value are reduced to mere whimsy or opinion, they fail to appeal to some overarching conception of the common good, and are thereby stripped of the stature traditionally given to statements about right and wrong. This is because we have fallen under the spell of emotivism, “the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling” (11-2, emphasis his). (2)Īccording to MacIntyre, the language of contemporary morality lacks the common ground necessary to measure moral assertions as true or false people cannot agree on matters of moral veracity because their respective moral universes have so little in common with one another. But we have––very largely, if not entirely––lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality. We possess simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. The language of morality is in… state of grave disorder…What we possess, if this view is true, are fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived.
This is a grand and fascinating journey through the history of ethics, fueled by MacIntyre’s argument for a modern renaissance of Aristotelian thought. Several chapters from Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue were instrumental in my undergraduate thesis, but I never got around to reading the whole book until now.
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