A.M.'s "After Virtue" is a conservative work in the true sense of the word: it aims to regain and conserve what was once an Aristotelian ethics in the post-modern world where ethics has become a displaced language devoid of substance. For the greeks ethics was within, as was power and virtue, identifiable with the city: all could be achieved without the action of acquisition. For the modern exitentialist it is quite the opposite: we are, in essence, nothing; and we have to achieve ourselves through acquiring. And yet, though our conception of the human has changed, our language has apparently not: we still demand of the human to act accordingly to some moral good when we ourselves have lost track of what morality and goodness are in themselves, if they are anything @ all in themselves, apart from ideated constructions. The Enlightenment project failed by applying scientific methodology to ethics, and MacIntyre is correct in that assessment, but the motive why Reason was so appealing was because it clarified and made transparent: MacIntyre seems to consider that epystemology is second to ethics and that science and the post-modern technical world can accept ancient ethics when the fabric of the world we live in and our representations of Nature (from New Age Mother-God to Evil-Hurricane-Bitch-Destroyer) are galaxies away from ancient representations of that nature. A.M. considers that we can rescue Aristotle's ethics without needing his metaphysics: but that is just what Kant and all the philosophers of the Sollen did: separate the real world from ethical doing. In not time we will be demanding what we already do: "Honour thy Father and Mother" when there is no father and mother to honour: they got a divorce and left! Ethics was killed by the moderns and we have to accept politics for what it really is: the power of strength to do whatever. That the power can be checked by others is a fine statement; but in a world where, in order to be noticed, one has to be trans-obvious and where the greatest virtue is efficiency, i have no idea how we will accept going back 25 centuries and pretending that the society we have created can be either reversed to its pre-industrial stage or that these reborn ethics will remain unaltered and unchanged when surrounded by the post-industrialisation we have built. This is a fine book, with amazing insights. But A.M.'s historical perspective surprisingly does not come to terms with the technical demands of 21st century planet earth. And there is only one way to convince ppl to accept Aristotelian ethics these days, and that is by strength.
|
