What does Veeky Forums think of virtue ethics?

MacIntyre's virtue ethics is pretty unique. Quite historicist. It's a great read, and his points are definitely well made and worth considering. Ultimately I can't get behind it because it does require a metaphysical basis: his Thomism.

Undefined nonsense.

Virtue is nonsense.

>Quite historicist

How do you mean? Does his Hegelian and Marxian influences seep into his defense of virtue ethics? Does this mean he reconciles aspects of them with Thomism?

The book is an attempt to characterise the moral state of modern society. He tells a story of morality and how philosophers started to go astray around the Enlightenment. Long story short, today's moral landscape is an "emotivist" one where everyone just talks past each other, and this is because we as a culture have lost a common understanding of what it means to be a good person (virtues). He's influenced by Marx but is not a Marxist. He likes Marx's critique of capitalism, and liberalism more broadly, because it promotes, well, individualism basically. It encourages selfishness and material gain, which disintegrates communities. No community; no morality.

It's like a Left-wing traditionalism. Kinda cool actually.

Interesting. It was actually recommended to me by someone who regarded it as an important read for someone on the Right.

Does one need to have a developed understanding of Aristotelian virtue ethics going into it?

straight shota or the other kind?

>Interesting. It was actually recommended to me by someone who regarded it as an important read for someone on the Right.
I knew they'd try to claim him.
Remember this: MacIntyre fucking hates neoliberalism, and has thrown some cheeky shade at American culture in general. He's a hardcore Catholic pessimist. He thought the Iraq war was immoral. He considers Muslims allies against the dominant culture of secularism.

>Does one need to have a developed understanding of Aristotelian virtue ethics going into it?
Maybe just read a summary of Nicomachean Ethics or something

the good kind

I see. Thanks for the responses. I actually already have a copy of it that I've been putting off from cracking open; it sounds like something up my alley, as I'm not particularly convinced by the "orthodox" theories of morality, and I've been influenced by anti-Enlightenment Leftist thinkers already, Marcuse to give one example.

Yeah you'd prob like it then. Btw, MacIntyre insists that you can agree with him while not agreeing with him about Thomism. I personally just think that his worldview ultimately needs his Thomism to be watertight. But I can still get a hell of a lot out of him. Like, his diagnosis of the problem is basically spot on. I just embrace the nihilistic postmodern dance cos I'm an edgelord xD

1) His critique of Nietzsche struck me as profoundly weak.

2) His faith in "The Virtues"/Aristotle and Thomism is pretty telling, and his general thesis teeters out as the book draws to a close. Like Marx, by whom he was clearly influenced, he examines the problem but generally stops short of solutions.

makes a good point, however.

>Long story short, today's moral landscape is an "emotivist" one where everyone just talks past each other

This is a profound problem that we have yet to overcome.

McIntyre believes (or realizes, depending on your perspective) that we need some sort of objective foundation/starting point from which to make moral/ethical arguments. The alternative is that we're all in some sort of metaphorical moral ocean, just floating around without a standard by which to arbitrate whether one judgement is better than another, and vice versa. The alternative is emotivism, where people merely argue such things on the basis of feeling/opinion - which nobody will ever win.

>McIntyre believes (or realizes, depending on your perspective) that we need some sort of objective foundation/starting point from which to make moral/ethical arguments. The alternative is that we're all in some sort of metaphorical moral ocean, just floating around without a standard by which to arbitrate whether one judgement is better than another, and vice versa.
Almost everybody realizes that, the reason we're in that ocean is that what that starting point should be is precisely what philosophers can't agree on.

MacIntyre critiques that there is even a debate about it though. He doesn't think rationality can ground values like that, as the Enlightenment did. As soon as you asked the question, you've walked off the edge, according to him.

Not the poster you're responding to, but I would argue liberalism fundamentally makes no claims about morality; it assumes the role of a mechanism that mediates between moral visions of the world, beginning with the individual. It just so happens that, prior to the modern world, in the West herd morality was fundamentally Judeo-Christian. As those systems are on the decline, we see a massive division in the moral fabric of society.

If you want to be historicist about it, you could probably look at the infancy of liberalism to be coalesced in Machiavellianism as a crucial paragon in the trajectory.

What is his fundamental critique of Nietzsche? Do you think it's appropriate to say Nietzsche had his own peculiar, strange form of virtue ethic?

He basically says that Nietzsche succeeded in taking the whole Enlightenment project to task, and indeed to pieces, with respect to morality/etc, but that his alternative was worse.

The trouble with McIntyre is that he's essentially advocating a regression. His insistence on the Virtues/etc is basically one long, reactionary nostalgia trip.

Nietzsche's ethic can hardly be called virtue ethics exactly.

The fact that he held to the belief that the act of willing a value to come to pass as the most important aspect of humans, makes him stand out from all moral philosophers, because it essentially means that anything from squashing a bug to the Holocaust can be justified as an act of sheer Will.

>Do you think it's appropriate to say Nietzsche had his own peculiar, strange form of virtue ethic?

I suppose in a way. The highest ideal of the Greeks, or specially Aristotle, to whom McIntyre appeals is 'Goodness.'

Nietzsche's highest ideal is essentially strength/power. Any kind of strength or power is deemed good, in and by itself, just as goodness was to the Greeks.

Puissance pour puissance.

>achieving Goodness through God's power

>MacIntyre critiques that there is even a debate about it though. He doesn't think rationality can ground values like that, as the Enlightenment did.
People have been arguing rationally or pseudo-rationally about the basis of ethics for as long as ethics existed, not just since the Enlightenment. And I don't really see a way out of this "problem" without asking people to drop all self-awareness.