MacIntyre on Morality, Virtue, and The End in After Virtue

1. Moral arguments today are seemingly irresoluble because we do not have an established way of deciding between premises that are too disparate to be weighed against one another, we presume impersonal criteria when presenting arguments, and our conception of morality is fragmented and decontextualized.
2. Virtues are necessary in order to acquire the internal goods of a particular practice, or to succeed in that practice.
3. Virtues can thus be witnessed in (and developed through) practices, which are never isolated but themselves have histories and are passed on to us through traditions of communities.
4. People, too, have narrative histories, and it is only within the context of a unitary narrative that a person’s actions can be intelligible and a person’s life be both intelligible and unified.
5. We need to understand life as a narrated ‘quest’, which presupposes that there is a telos toward which we are working, and it is only on the grounds of one’s success or failure to both understand and reach this telos that we can judge a life to be good or otherwise.

What then is needed in order for us to regain a coherent moral scheme, one that we can comprehend?

MacIntyre seems to present virtue as the key to rehabilitating a fragmented conception of morality. He claims that “A practice involves…the achievement of goods” (283) and that practices could not “flourish in societies in which the virtues were not valued” (285). Thus, we need virtues in order to achieve goods. But, he says, this does not necessarily mean that “whatever flows from a virtue is right” (288). So virtues alone cannot make for a good human life. Then what can make for a good life?

MacIntyre argues that we need “a conception of moral law” in addition to virtues if we are to have a good life (288). So, he says, it is clear that “the scope” of virtues “extends beyond the practices” within which we initially cultivate them, meaning that they exist in some broader context (288). This broader context for him is the whole of human life.

A person’s life draws its unity from a unitary story, or narrative. An important thing to remember about narratives is that our narratives are, in a sense, shared with others. MacIntyre explains, “I am part of their story, they are part of mine. The narrative of any one life is part of an interlocking set of narratives” (292). Thus a person’s life is a single whole, and so MacIntyre argues that “[s]omeone who genuinely possesses a virtue can be expected to manifest it in very different types of situations”. Accordingly, virtues, which enable us to achieve [internal] goods, are not confined to just one thing that we do but are manifest regularly throughout our life story.

Even so, if virtues alone cannot make for a ‘good life’, then we still need something to help guide us toward what is good for us. Here MacIntyre argues that we must simply search for a conception of “the final telos”, or of what is the good for humankind (292). This, he says, is the ‘quest’ of life. If we can eventually come to understand “the good”—the final, ultimate goal for humankind—then we will be able “to order other goods” accordingly and remain focused on the good (292). Because our lives ‘embody’ unitary narratives, we can look to our individual narratives and ask who we are, why we do things, and what is good truly good for us. Since our narratives are, in a sense, shared then we can also ask about the identity of others, why others do things, and what is truly good for all humankind (291-2). For MacIntyre, looking into our life stories and asking questions about ourselves and what is good is part of what it means to live a good life. “The good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man”. “[T]he virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to understand what more and what else the good life for man is” (293). MacIntyre says it’s also a necessary part of the good life not only to “sustain the form of the individual life in which that individual may seek out his or her good as the good of his or her whole life, but also [to] sustain[ ] those traditions which provide both practices and individual lives with their necessary historical context” (295-6). Thus he says it’s also a virtue to “hav[e] an adequate sense of the traditions to which one belongs or which confront one” (296).

Is MacIntyre right that we must have a telos around which to structure our lives? Is searching for it enough to really make for a good life, or do we have to know what the good is before we set out looking for it? Can we know what the good is before we look for it? Why or why not? How can we know that we’ve found the good?