In this episode, we discuss Alasdair MacIntyre’s landmark book After Virtue. MacIntyre, an ex-Marxist and committed anti-liberal, offers a defense of the Aristotelian tradition and its search for the truly common good against the dominant tendency of liberal societies to reduce morality to individual preferences. Modern society, MacIntyre believes, is one where we live fragmented lives, unable to narrate a coherent story of the relationship between morality and politics. Our invocations of morality ring increasingly hollow as we cannot even imagine what it would mean to convince others of what is good. We explore how the loss of morality coincides with all of us becoming moralists, why it seems we have to choose between Nietzsche and Aristotle, the costs of teaching morality like a choose-your-own-adventure buffet, and whether MacIntyre offers a compelling solution to our nihilistic times. The least we can say is that living without virtue is a real bummer!

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References:

Alasadair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd Edition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).

Émile Perreau-Saussine, Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography. trans. Nathan J. Pinkski (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022).

Michael Lazarus, Absolute Ethical Life: Aristotle, Hegel and Marx (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2025). 

Music:

“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com

“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN