After Virtue

Moral Minority

This episode examines Alasdair MacIntyre's attempt to explain the existence of interminable moral and political disagreement as a symptom of the disarray of our inherited moral concepts. MacIntyre contends that the best way to unify our disparate and competing concepts of right, obligation, and virtue is to understand them as emerging from determinate social conditions. What modernity lacks or has forgotten in its instrumental use of moral concepts is that normative questions like "what ought we to do?" and "what does justice require ?" are only intelligible against a background of shared communal goals. In the absence of any shared conceptions of human nature and our ultimate ends, morality is unmoored. MacIntyre proposes that a reinvigorated account of the virtues embedded in the narrative unity of a human life is our best bet for breaking the apparent incommensurability and confusions of contemporary moral debates.