Episode #244 ... After Virtue - Alasdair MacIntyre (why moral conversations feel unsatisfying)

Stephen West· Host0:00

Hello everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!, patreon.com/philosophizethis, philosophical writing on Substack at philosophizethis on there. I hope you love the show today. So I want you to imagine a world where some kind of major crisis goes down in the sciences, where then after it happens, people no longer believed in the scientific method anymore as a reliable way of arriving at knowledge about the world. In other words, imagine in this world people no longer believe that it's valid for scientists to go out into the field, run their experiments. Imagine all that stuff's just not trusted anymore, but that at a cultural level, people still go on and use all kinds of scientific terminology as a way to describe all the things around them. Imagine people still use terms like gravity in everyday discussion. They may talk about the, the nucleus of something in a conversation. They may talk about the inertia of their career. But imagine they use these scientific terms without the foundation that made sense of these things in the first place. Well, eventually what you might see there are people that have their own definitions of what gravity is or what gravity means to them. You know, "This is my truth when it comes to gravity," they might say. "Atoms to me just behave differently than atoms do to you." The whole picture of this may seem kind of ridiculous at first, but to the guy we're talking about today, Alasdair MacIntyre, this is a metaphor he uses at the beginning of his book, After Virtue, to explain what he thinks is actually going on when it comes to the confusion we often run into in our modern conversations about morality. To put it simply, he thinks we live today in something like a hellscape of emotivism, in a world where conversations