After Virtue

⚖The case for it

Imagine the sciences destroyed and rebuilt from surviving fragments, people using words like neutrino correctly with no theory underneath. MacIntyre says that is the actual state of our moral language, left in “fragments of a once-coherent scheme of thought,” and readers describe the whole book reorganizing around that opening. Emotivism then explains why moral arguments online never resolve, the payoff that pays for the history. The chapter on practices and internal goods, worked through chess and farming, gets excerpted on its own, and more than one reader names it flatly “my favorite chapter.” His managers, exercising raw will while claiming technical neutrality, still describe institutional life. The Nietzsche chapter is a genuine surprise.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Without Aristotle’s Ethics and Anscombe’s 1958 essay you are joining a conversation already underway, which more than one reader calls simply “hard going.” The middle survey compresses two thousand years and is where momentum dies. Liberal individualism recurs so often as the villain that one reader calls it “villain-music.” The demolition runs long and the cure runs thin, the Aristotelian proposal left, in one reader’s word, “postulated, rather than rigorously developed.” His claim that pre-modern moral life was coherent is asserted rather than shown. Left-leaning readers ask what the alternative actually is, one demanding “what’s left? Fascism? Aristocracy?” and another concluding grimly “there is no way out.” The ending points forward to his later books.

— the honest librarian

6h

honest hours

9

sittings