Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes on Virtue
Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre was a Scottish-American moral and political philosopher and one of the principal architects of the late twentieth-century revival of virtue ethics. This page collects quotes attributed to Alasdair MacIntyre on the topic of virtue, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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Attributed to Alasdair MacIntyre:
“I can only answer the question 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question 'Of what story do I find myself a part?'”
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Attributed to Alasdair MacIntyre:
“The barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for some time.”
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Attributed to Alasdair MacIntyre:
“Practices are constituted by goods internal to them.”
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“Imprisoning philosophy within the professionalizations and specializations of an institutionalized curriculum, after the manner of our contemporary European and North American culture, is arguably a good deal more effective in neutralizing its effects than either religious censorship or political terror”
Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue , 1913-1922 (ed. 2007) -
“A striking feature of moral and political argument in the modern world is the extent to which it is innovators, radicals, and revolutionaries who revive old doctrines, while their conservative and reactionary opponents are the inventors of new ones.”
A Short History of Ethics -
“The manager treats ends as given, as outside his scope; his concern is with technique , with effectiveness … The therapist also treats ends as given, as outside his scope; his concern also is with technique, with effectiveness … Neither manager nor therapist, in their roles as manager and therapist, do or are able to engage in moral debate. They … purport to restrict themselves to the realms in which rational agreement in possible—that is, … to the realm of fact, the realm of means, the realm of measurable effectiveness.”
p. 30 -
“I have confronted theoretical positions whose protagonists claim that what I take to be historically produced characteristics of what is specifically modern are in fact the timelessly necessary characteristics of all and any moral judgment, of all and any selfhood.”
p. 35 -
“On Kant’s view it can never follow from the fact that God commands us to do such-and-such that we ought to do such-and-such. In order for us to reach such a conclusion we would also have to know that we always ought to do what God commands. But this last we could not know unless we ourselves possessed a standard of moral judgment independent of God’s commandments by means of which we could judge God’s deeds and words and so find the latter morally worthy of obedience. But clearly if we possess such a standard, the commandments of God will be redundant.”
pp. 44-45