Home > Author > Alasdair MacIntyre
41 " It is yet another of Nietzsche’s merits that he joins to his critique of Enlightenment moralities a sense of their failure to address adequately, let alone to answer the question: what sort of person am I to become? This is in a way an inescapable question in that an answer to it is given in practice in each human life. But for characteristically modern moralities it is a question to be approached only by indirection. The primary question from their standpoint has concerned rules: what rules ought we to follow? "
― Alasdair MacIntyre , After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory
42 " the present is intelligible only as a commentary upon and response to the past in which the past, if necessary and if possible, is corrected and transcended, "
43 " Modern conservatives are for the most part engaged in conserving only older rather than later versions of liberal individualism. Their own core doctrine is as liberal and as individualist as that of self-avowed liberals. "
― Alasdair MacIntyre
44 " A 1960 study of the I.Q.s of those completing Ph.D. requirements in various disciplines showed that natural scientists are significantly more intelligent than social scientists (although chemists drag down the natural science averages and economists raise the social science average). "
45 " The self-assertive shrillness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure that protestors can never win an argument; the indignant self-righteousness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure equally that the protestors can never lose an argument either. Hence the utterance of protest is characteristically addressed to those who already share the protestors’ premises. The effects of incommensurability ensure that protestors rarely have anyone else to talk to but themselves. This is not to say that protest cannot be effective; it is to say that it cannot be rationally effective and that its dominant modes of expression give evidence of a certain perhaps unconscious awareness of this. "
46 " From this it does not of course follow that there are no natural or human rights; it only follows that no one could have known that there were. And this at least raises certain questions. But we do not need to be distracted into answering them, for the truth is plain: there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns. "
47 " Analytic philosophy, that is to say, can very occasionally produce practically conclusive results of a negative kind. It can show in a few cases that just too much incoherence and inconsistency is involved in some position for any reasonable person to continue to hold it. But it can never establish the rational acceptability of any particular position in cases where each of the alternative rival positions available has sufficient range and scope and the adherents of each are willing to pay the price necessary to secure coherence and consistency. Hence the peculiar flavor of so much contemporary analytic writing—by writers less philosophically self-aware than Rorty or Lewis—in which passages of argument in which the most sophisticated logical and semantic techniques available are deployed in order to secure maximal rigor alternate with passages which seem to do no more than cobble together a set of loosely related arbitrary preferences; contemporary analytic philosophy exhibits a strange partnership between an idiom deeply indebted to Frege and Carnap and one deriving from the more simple-minded forms of existentialism "
48 " We are so accustomed to classifying judgments, arguments and deeds in terms of morality that we forget how relatively new the notion was in the culture of the Enlightenment. "
49 " We know that there are no self-evident truths. "
50 " Totalitarianism of a certain kind, as imagined by Aldous Huxley or George Orwell, is therefore impossible. What the totalitarian project will always produce will be a kind of rigidity and inefficiency which may contribute in the long run to its defeat. We need to remember however the voices from Auschwitz and Gulag Archipelago which tell us just how long that long run is. "
51 " The good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man "
52 " The choice between the ethical and the aesthetic is not the choice between good and evil, it is the choice whether or not to choose in terms of good and evil. "
53 " J.B. Bury once followed Pascal in suggesting that the cause of the foundation of the Roman Empire was the length of Cleopatra’s nose: had her features not been perfectly proportioned, Mark Antony would not have been entranced; had he not been entranced he would not have allied himself with Egypt against Octavian; had he not made that alliance, the battle of Actium would not have been fought—and so on. "
54 " Man is ... essentially a story-telling animal. That means I can only answer the question 'what am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question of 'what story or stories do I find myself a part of? "
55 " Nietzsche is the moral philosopher of the present age. For I have already argued that the present age is in its presentation of itself dominantly Weberian, and I have also noticed that Nietzsche’s central thesis was presupposed by Weber’s central categories of thought. Hence Nietzsche’s prophetic irrationalism – irrationalism because Nietzsche’s problems remain unresolved and his solutions defy reason – remains immanent in the Weberian managerial forms of our culture. Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral foundations of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises. And consequently it is possible to predict with confidence that in the apparently quite unlikely contexts of bureaucratically managed modern societies there will periodically emerge social movements informed by just that kind of prophetic irrationalism of which Nietzsche’s thought is the ancestor. Indeed just because and insofar contemporary Marxism is Weberian in substance we can expect prophetic irrationalisms of the left as well as of the Right. So it was was with much student radicalism of the sixties. "
56 " In any society where government does not express or represent the moral community of the citizens, but is instead a set of institutional arrangements for imposing a bureaucratized unity on a society which lacks genuine moral consensus, the nature of political obligation becomes systematically unclear. "
57 " The concept of a person is that of a character abstracted from a history. "
58 " Indeed from an Aristotelian point of view a modern liberal political society can appear only as a collection of citizens of nowhere who have banded together for their common protection. "
59 " To say that a belief is rational is to talk about how it stands in relation to other beliefs "
60 " At least some of the items in a Homeric list of the aretai would clearly not be counted by most of us nowadays as virtues at all, physical strength being the most obvious example. "
