Charles Taylor Quotes on Virtue

Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self (1989) gave the contemporary communitarian critique of liberal moral philosophy its most ambitious historical statement. Modern moral identity, Taylor argues, has been constituted through the layered inheritance of multiple sources — Platonic, Augustinian, Romantic, Enlightenment — and contemporary moral confusion arises from the suppression of the constitutive frameworks that the procedural conception of moral reasoning has urged us to leave behind. The argument extends across the philosophical anthropology of Hegel (1975) and the later A Secular Age (2007), and grounds Taylor's distinctive claim that human beings are self-interpreting animals whose strong evaluations — judgments about what is genuinely worthy of love, admiration, or respect — are constitutive of moral selfhood rather than features added on to a prior neutral agency.