## After Virtue ### After Virtue  #### Metadata * Author: [[MacIntyre, Alasdair]] * Full Title: After Virtue * Category: #books #### Highlights * Angst is an intermittently fashionable emotion and the misreading of some existentialist texts has turned despair itself into a kind of psychological nostrum. (Location 372) * For each premise employs some quite different normative or evaluative concept from the others, so that the claims made upon us are of quite different kinds. In the first argument, for example, premises which invoke justice and innocence are at odds with premises which invoke success and survival; in the second, premises which invoke rights are at odds with those which invoke universalizability; in the third it is the claim of equality that is matched against that of liberty. It is precisely because there is in our society no established way of deciding between these claims that moral argument appears to be necessarily interminable. (Location 425) * The concept of justice in the first argument has its roots in Aristotle's account of the virtues; the second argument's genealogy runs through Bismarck and Clausewitz to Machiavelli; the concept of liberation in the third argument has shallow roots in Marx, deeper roots in Fichte. In the second debate a concept of rights which has Lockean antecedents is matched against a view of universalizability which is recognizably Kantian and an appeal to the moral law which is Thomist. (Location 467) * the third debate an argument which owes debts to T.H. Green and to Rousseau competes with one which has Adam Smith as a grandfather. This (Location 471) * the transition from the variety of contexts in which they were originally at home to our own contemporary culture 'virtue' and 'justice' and 'piety' and 'duty' and even 'ought' have become other than they once were. How ought we to write the history of such changes? (Location 482) * Factual judgments are true or false; and in the realm of fact there are rational criteria by means of which we may secure agreement as to what is true and what is false. But moral judgments, being expressions of attitude or feeling, are neither true nor false; and agreement in moral judgment is not to be secured by any rational method, for there are none. It is to be secured, if at all, by producing certain non-rational effects on the emotions or attitudes of those who disagree with one. We use moral judgments not only to express our own feelings and attitudes, but also precisely to produce such effects in others. Emotivism is thus a theory which professes to give an account of all value judgments whatsoever. Clearly if it is true, all moral disagreement is rationally interminable; and clearly if that is true then certain of the features of contemporary moral debate to which I drew attention earlier do indeed have nothing to do with what is specifically contemporary. But is it true? (Location 511) # After Virtue  ## Metadata - Author: [[MacIntyre, Alasdair]] - Full Title: After Virtue - Category: #books ## Highlights - Angst is an intermittently fashionable emotion and the misreading of some existentialist texts has turned despair itself into a kind of psychological nostrum. (Location 372) - For each premise employs some quite different normative or evaluative concept from the others, so that the claims made upon us are of quite different kinds. In the first argument, for example, premises which invoke justice and innocence are at odds with premises which invoke success and survival; in the second, premises which invoke rights are at odds with those which invoke universalizability; in the third it is the claim of equality that is matched against that of liberty. It is precisely because there is in our society no established way of deciding between these claims that moral argument appears to be necessarily interminable. (Location 425) - The concept of justice in the first argument has its roots in Aristotle’s account of the virtues; the second argument’s genealogy runs through Bismarck and Clausewitz to Machiavelli; the concept of liberation in the third argument has shallow roots in Marx, deeper roots in Fichte. In the second debate a concept of rights which has Lockean antecedents is matched against a view of universalizability which is recognizably Kantian and an appeal to the moral law which is Thomist. (Location 467) - the third debate an argument which owes debts to T.H. Green and to Rousseau competes with one which has Adam Smith as a grandfather. This (Location 471) - the transition from the variety of contexts in which they were originally at home to our own contemporary culture ‘virtue’ and ‘justice’ and ‘piety’ and ‘duty’ and even ‘ought’ have become other than they once were. How ought we to write the history of such changes? (Location 482) - Factual judgments are true or false; and in the realm of fact there are rational criteria by means of which we may secure agreement as to what is true and what is false. But moral judgments, being expressions of attitude or feeling, are neither true nor false; and agreement in moral judgment is not to be secured by any rational method, for there are none. It is to be secured, if at all, by producing certain non-rational effects on the emotions or attitudes of those who disagree with one. We use moral judgments not only to express our own feelings and attitudes, but also precisely to produce such effects in others. Emotivism is thus a theory which professes to give an account of all value judgments whatsoever. Clearly if it is true, all moral disagreement is rationally interminable; and clearly if that is true then certain of the features of contemporary moral debate to which I drew attention earlier do indeed have nothing to do with what is specifically contemporary. But is it true? (Location 511)