In an interview on Virtue

Are all these books you’ve chosen in some sort of conversation with each other?

Yes. For example, Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the leading modern moral philosophers who’s revived the Aristotelian approach to ethics. After Virtue is his most famous book. It begins with this marvellous apocalyptic scenario in which he imagines a society where there’s been an anti-science revolution. Some time after this catastrophe, people begin to try to reconstruct Western science from the scraps that remain. They put together charred fragments of Euclid and Einstein, and try to make sense of them. But what they’re doing isn’t really science in the true sense, just fragments of science. MacIntyre’s point is that this is what’s happened to moral language in our society. We think we’re talking about morality, but actually we’re just left with the fragments of morality. Because what’s been lost is the central idea of human beings as creatures with an inherent end or purpose.

Where or when does he see this catastrophe as having taken place?

He sees two main culprits. The first is modern, post-Newtonian science, which encourages us to think of the world in terms of causal forces, devoid of any intrinsic meaning or purpose. The other is the modern secular state. We think of the state as simply a neutral mechanism for enabling us to pursue our own individual projects, rather than as an institution devoted to the common good. The book ends with a prophetic passage in which he says that the task now is to create local forms of community, in which the moral life can still be lived in the new dark ages which are already upon us. It’s powerful stuff. It provides a historical account of how the notion of virtue arose, and why it’s been lost. I think that’s its main strength. He doesn’t have very any realistic positive recommendations.