I just finished Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. As I blogged last week, I am knocked over by the breadth and depth of his learning, and his ability to pull together multiple threads. Just amazing.

I had first read the book shortly after it came out in 1981. I didn’t remember, however, that it is a cliffhanger. He does a magnificent job dismantling our principle-based view of morality. He proposes virtue as its replacement and does, well, a magnificent job of tracing the history of that concept through multiple millennia. And I am overall sympathetic to recognizing the role of community in the founding of morality and ethics. But I didn’t think he quite pulled the rabbit out of the hat. Perhaps that’s because he ends the book with his sleeve rolled up and up to the elbow in the hat. The positive construction of a value-based ethics he leaves for a later book. I haven’t read the later book :(

There are several key points in his positive account of the virtues that I didn’t think he grounded well enough, although I am happy to withhold judgment until I read the next book. In particular, I want to see if his notion of the intrinsic good of virtues gets him to where he wants to go (distinguishing important, moral virtues from other types of excellences), how much diversity in the taxonomy of virtues he allows, whether he can really maintain the idea that lives have (are constituted by?) narratives, and whether his notion that a moral community has to be in conversation about its purpose brings us back to the typical philosophical narcissism that says that the good life is the philosophical life.

Even so, the book is fantastic. For example, his few pages on Nozick and Rawls scratches just the itch I always knew I had about those two: They write about morality as if we are rational agents making up our minds about joining a community, rather than as complex creatures who only are what we are because we are already in a community. MacIntyre works similar magic on everything from Homer to Jane Austin. [Tags: alasdair_macintyre virtue philosophy ethics morality ]