Nietzsche or Aristotle? : Reflections on Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue

[This article was originally published in Soundings in 1984 (vol. 67, no. 1).]

I

Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue reads like a brief but extremely dense novel: its plot gradually unfolds; it has its moments of suspense and discovery; there are climaxes and anti-climaxes. Indeed, it is written in that very genre of dramatic narrative that MacIntyre tells us is so vital for understanding human life and action. This should not be mistaken for a criticism, for if MacIntyre is right, this is precisely the genre required for understanding moral philosophy, and for appreciating the tradition of the virtues which he seeks to defend. Like the English novels he so admires, it is crammed full with “characters” (who sometimes make rapid entrances and exits) and intricate “sub-plots,” but so much so, that it is easy to lose the thread of the main plot. Since MacIntyre’s primary intention is to provide a rational vindication of “the moral tradition to which Aristotle’s teaching about the virtues is central” (p. 238), it is essential to outline the main story line—even at the risk of neglecting the extraordinary richness of detail as his narrative unfolds.

The book consists of eighteen chapters and reaches its first major dramatic climax at its very center: Chapter 9, entitled “Nietzsche or Aristotle?” In his Prologue, MacIntyre introduces a “disquieting suggestion.” In our so-called moral practice and language, a “catastrophe” has occurred, a catastrophe that he likens to one of those science fiction tales where somehow the whole tradition of natural science is destroyed, and where we are left with incoherent fragments which are no longer genuine science but only the simulacra of science. He hypothesizes that a point is reached where no one (or hardly anyone) realizes the nature of the catastrophe which they have suffered. People act and talk as if what they were calling science still made sense, still is coherent and rational, but in fact their actions and talk are radically incoherent. Embellishing his tale, MacIntyre’s hypothesis is that it is not a fiction, but precisely what has happened in the modern period with the language and practice of morality, both in regard to the way in which ordinary people talk, think, and act, and in regard to the way in which so-called moral philosophers talk about morality. The language of morality is no longer intelligible, coherent, or rational—even though almost everybody thinks it is.

Like those novels which begin with the present and then work back into the narrative history of the present, MacIntyre begins by rehearsing some characteristics of contemporary moral disagreement, and by presenting certain claims embodied in contemporary emotivism. He maintains that contemporary moral disagreements have an interminable character and are based upon conceptually incommensurable premises. While MacIntyre argues that emotivism is false as a theory about the meaning of the sentences which are used to make moral judgments, he does allow that it can properly be understood as reflecting a correct sociological hypothesis about the way in which people now act, think, and talk.

For one way of framing my contention that morality is not what it once was is just to say that to a large degree people now think, talk and act as if emotivism were true, no matter what their avowed theoretical stand-point may be. 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.

(p. 21)

What follows will strike many as both shocking and scandalous. For what MacIntyre seeks to show, in what may be called his genealogical unmasking, is that despite the “rationalistic pretentions” of post-Enlightenment moral philosophy, it is nothing but a disguised expression of the emotivism which has become embodied and well-entrenched in modern society and culture. The central “characters,” or ideal types, of this culture are the aesthete...