Emptiness and Its Consequences: MacIntyre on “Emotivism” (Audio)

10/20/19 • 19 min

In Chapters 2 and 3 of MacIntyre’s After Virtue, we learn what “emotivism” is and why MacIntyre dislikes it. In particular, he identifies emotivism as the primary way people now think about moral arguments, and he blames emotivism for our inability to reach any moral agreement. Even more interestingly, he sees in the modern bureacratic/managerial organization an expression of emotivism that leads to a lack of agency and responsibility. This is because the emotivist “self” is basically empty–moving from feeling to feeling but with no real grounding–and this emptiness is then filled by stronger forces in society–political and commercial. MacIntyre argues that in a traditional society the self is filled by pre-ordained social roles–but is this any better? The latter is a question we’ll ask as we move on into MacIntyre’s defense of Aristotelian virtue ethics.

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Alasdair MacIntyre’s Third Way (After Virtue 3–Audio)

Alasdair MacIntyre developed a method that promised a third way, avoiding the problems of both moral absolutism and moral relativism. He makes clear in his Prologue to the third edition of After Virtue that he borrows from counter-Enlightenment philosopher Giambattista Vico in developing his methodology of empathetic imagination with the aim of creating a way to gain an understanding of the flaws in the liberal system and the possible cures for those flaws in an older Aristotelian framework.

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Groping for Moral Certitude (After Virtue 5) Audio

In Chapters 4 and 5 MacIntyre begins his critique of modern political thought, going backwards from existentialism to the early modern period, tracing the steps that led to the disconnect with the older Aristotelian/Christian tradition. After finding that no modern political thought has been able to adequately ground its preferences for certain moral principles in anything solid, he argues that most of these philosophers operated with unacknowledged preferences for traditional values but had no good argument for them. He then begins the process of arguing for a teleological perspective–the idea that we can judge things (and people?) good or bad based on whether or not they fulfill their natural function. This is, of course, the most controversial element in MacIntyre’s argument so far, because it may be construed as threatening the freedom of the individual to invent himself.