After Virtue Part IV — What is a Virtue?

Part I; Part II; Part III

Alright, now I admit that my multi-part series on MacIntyre’s After Virtue has not exactly been the most riv­et­ing work and I sus­pect that wad­ing into any of the post has given some of you bad col­lege flash­backs but I main­tain the impor­tance of what M. is try­ing to com­mu­ni­cate.  We do not func­tion with a coher­ent sense of eth­i­cal deci­sion mak­ing.  Now I am not fully con­vinced of M.‘s response to this sit­u­a­tion but under­stand­ing our sit­u­a­tion is pretty impor­tant.  So read on to hear about M.‘s pos­i­tive con­tri­bu­tion to ethics.

In his sur­vey of virtues through his­tory Mac­In­tyre is quick to admit that virtues vary from place to place and age to age. What is vir­tu­ous for a an ancient Greek war­rior may not be vir­tu­ous for an Athen­ian gen­tle­men which also may not be vir­tu­ous for a medieval Chris­t­ian. In order to out­line the con­ti­nu­ity of this moral frame­work in the midst of these dis­crep­an­cies Mac­In­tyre addresses three main aspect of virtue ethics.

First is his con­cept of a prac­tice. A vir­tu­ous prac­tice could be sum­ma­rized as a human activ­ity such as farm­ing or play­ing chess in which the goods of the prac­tice are inter­nal (value in and of them­selves) not exter­nal (for sake of money, sta­tus, power, etc.). And it is through these prac­tices that the good and ends of human­ity are extended.  A vir­tu­ous prac­tice has inher­ent value.

Sec­ond is that a virtue assumes the unity of a human life. This is described as a nar­ra­tive unity. Each person’s life con­sti­tutes a unique nar­ra­tive but not an iso­lated or fully con­trol­lable nar­ra­tive. Nar­ra­tives are woven and embed­ded together with other indi­vid­u­als and his­to­ries (our fam­i­lies, com­mu­ni­ties, reli­gions, etc.). What nar­ra­tives assume though is a con­text and a direc­tion even if not com­pletely defined. Indi­vid­ual lives are enhanced and restricted because they par­tic­i­pate in some­thing larger. Virtues then move indi­vid­u­als towards what is good for all, towards the larger nar­ra­tive end.

Third, these prac­tices and nar­ra­tives move towards a par­tic­u­lar end because they are enacted in par­tic­u­lar tra­di­tions. A tra­di­tion rather than being con­ceived as a sta­tic and con­serv­ing pres­ence (or some­thing dead as is often the stereo­type)  is here described as “an his­tor­i­cally extended, socially embod­ied argu­ment, and an argu­ment pre­cisely in part about the goods which con­sti­tute that tra­di­tion” (pg. 222). The liv­ing and dying of tra­di­tions is based then in large part on the sur­vival and prac­tice of its par­tic­u­lar virtues. The out­come then of virtue ethics is a “capac­ity of judg­ment” (pg. 223). These three com­po­nents develop a dis­cern­ing pos­ture about how we are to live and relate.  The assump­tion is that the vir­tu­ous char­ac­ter can­not do every­thing he or she ought to (some­times one good choice will exclude a per­son from mak­ing another equally good choice) but that there are bet­ter and worse ways of nav­i­gat­ing con­flict­ual contexts.

Mac­In­tyre con­cludes his work by stat­ing that there is indeed no proof to claim in his pri­or­ity for recov­er­ing a re-conceived notion of Aris­totelian virtue ethics. Seek­ing proofs was the pit­fall of the Enlight­en­ment project. How­ever, in return­ing to his frame­work of prac­tices, nar­ra­tive, and tra­di­tions Mac­In­tyre argues that this con­cept of virtue offers a viable and nec­es­sary alter­na­tive to the frag­mented and ulti­mately decep­tive project of mod­ern lib­eral individualism.

Is this indeed true?  Is there enough pos­i­tive con­tent in MacInyre’s project to sus­tain com­mu­ni­ties in dis­tinct way from how they are already mak­ing eth­i­cal deci­sions?  I’ll try to address this in my final post on this series.