Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/5/84; site wucs.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!mhuxt!houxm!ihnp4!wucs!esk
From: esk@wucs.UUCP (Paul V. Torek)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: MacIntyre and judging political axioms
Message-ID: <879@wucs.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 10-Apr-85 15:12:01 EST
Article-I.D.: wucs.879
Posted: Wed Apr 10 15:12:01 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 11-Apr-85 01:04:09 EST
Reply-To: pvt1047@wucece2.UUCP (Paul V. Torek)
Distribution: net
Organization: Washington U. in St. Louis, CS Dept.
Lines: 37

Lines beginning with > are from tonyw@ubvax.UUCP (Tony Wuersch)

> These thoughts aren't entirely my own.  They're inspired by what has
> become my favorite "book for future generations" -- After Virtue, by
> Alisdair MacIntyre. [...]
> Once there were many virtues, interdependently referring to each other
> and subject to moderating virtues which balanced their proportion in society.
> These virtues included justice, friendship, wisdom, excellence, beauty, and
> others.  An Aristotelean polis was supposed to cultivate and preserve the
> virtues, particularly the public virtues of justice, wisdom, and excellence.

"Once there were many" -- and now there aren't?  :->  Actually, I fail to
see what was so great about the moral theory of that (hypothetical?) place
and time.  I fail to see how one can tell what the virtues are, or why they
are worth cultivating, without a *prior* understanding of good and bad --
in particular, of what's good or bad for a person.  Thus I see MacIntyre's
whole emphasis on "virtues" as putting the cart before the horse.

> Most of the rules of this [Enlightenment] project he [MacIntyre] labels
> "liberal individualism", a point of view which imagines that individuals
> can invent premises to moral philosophies out of nothing but their own
> imaginations, such that competition between these premises can be papered
> over into pluralist "consensuses".  [...]
> We should abandon the project of rationally constructing whole moral and
> political systems by deduction from axioms put forth by historically bound,
> subjective wills.  That was the Enlightenment project which has failed.

I agree wholeheartedly with the rejection of "liberal individualism" so
defined.  That is indeed a project doomed to fail.  But the cure offered,
I think, is no better than the disease.

> Tony Wuersch
				Paul V. Torek, ihnp4!wucs!wucec1!pvt1047
Dick Naugle Says
"o PREPARE FOOD FRESH
 o SERVE CUSTOMERS FAST
 o KEEP PLACE CLEAN"