I am grateful to Stephen Loxton of Sherborne School for Girls for this summary of key points from After Virtue.

A number of modern scholars of philosophy and ethics have given lengthy consideration to the debate about V.E. Foremost among them is Alasdair MacIntyre, whose text After Virtue is seen by many as seminal in this field.

MacIntyre makes a significant attempt to demolish the views of philosophers and ethicists who take an emotivist view of ethical language – that ideas such as ‘good' and ‘bad', right and wrong, are simply matters of feeling or preference. He argues passionately for a need to recover a sense of moral virtue, and he puts forward the argument that societies and cultures down through the ages, even the Christian New Testament, hold to a virtue ethic. People need to create a narrative order in their lives – ‘narrative' is a word he uses in outlining his argument.

Below you will find some significant quotations from MacIntyre, and you might like to note the significance of these extracts.

Extracts from MacIntyre's ‘After Virtue'

‘Emotivism has become embodied in our culture. But of course in saying this I am not merely contending that morality is not what it once was, but also and more importantly that what once was morality has to some large degree disappeared – and that this marks a degeneration, a grave cultural loss.' (p22)

‘I take it then that both the utilitarianism of the middle and late nineteenth century and the analytical moral philosophy of the middle and late twentieth century are alike unsuccessful attempts to rescue the autonomous moral agent from the predicament in which the failure of the Enlightenment project of providing him with a secular, rational justification for his moral allegiances had left him….. Each moral agent now spoke unconstrained by the externalities of divine law, natural teleology or hierarchical authority.' (p68)

‘On the modern view the justification of the virtues depends upon some prior justification of rules and principles; and if the latter become radically problematic, as they have, so also must the former.' (p119)

‘Morality and social structure are in fact one and the same in heroic society. There is only one set of social bonds. Morality as something distinct does not yet exist.' (p123)

"By a ‘practice' I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended" (187).

On Virtue:

‘A virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable use to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods' (191).

On Virtue & Practices:

‘Practices then might flourish in different societies with different codes; what they could not do is flourish in societies in which the virtues were not valued.' (p193)

On the virtues:

‘The virtues therefore are to be understood as those dispositions which will not only sustain practices and enable us to achieve the goods internal to practices, but which will also sustain us in the relevant kind of quest for the good, by enabling us to overcome the harms, dangers, temptations and distractions which we encounter, and which will furnish us with increasing selfknowledge and increasing knowledge of the good'. (219).

"The virtues find their point and purpose not only in sustaining those relationships necessary if the variety of goods internal to practices are to be achieved and not only in sustaining the form of an individual life in which that individual may seek out his or her good as the good of his or her whole life, but also in sustaining those traditions which provide both practices and individual lives with their necessary historical context" (223).

MacIntyre's conclusion:

‘My own conclusion is very clear. It is that on the one hand we still, in spite of the efforts of three centuries of moral philosophy and one of sociology, lack any coherent rationally defensible statement of a liberal individualist point of view; and that, on the other hand, the Aristotelian tradition can be restated in a way that restores intelligibility and rationality to our moral and social attitudes and commitments.' (p259)

‘My account of the virtues proceeds through three stages: a first which concerns virtues as qualities necessary to achieve the goods internal to practices; a second which considers them as qualities contributing to the good of a whole life; and a third which relates them to the pursuit of a good for human beings the conception of which can only be elaborated and possessed within an ongoing social tradition. Why begin from practices? Other moral philosophers after all have begun from a consideration of passions and desires or from the elucidation of some conception of duty or goodness. In either case the discussion is all too apt to be governed from then on by some version of the means-ends distinction according to which all human activities are either conducted as means to already given or decided ends or are simply worthwhile in themselves.' (p273)