Episode #245 ... The Rival Moral Approaches of the Modern World - Alasdair Macintyre

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 there's a pretty innocent statement I want to start this episode with that, by the way, I'll return back to throughout the episode and no doubt annoy some of you with it along the way. Just doing my job here. But it is a crucial piece of information that we need to remember if we want to understand where Alasdair MacIntyre is starting his thinking from for the rest of his work. A big point that'll ground all the rest he has to say is that there is no view from nowhere when it comes to statements that we make about morality or value. That is something we need to remember is a guarantee of what we even mean when we're talking about morality as a concept. And you know, it's easy to forget that this is a premise he's always operating from. But just remember all we talked about last time when we went over his book After Virtue, that when we try to remove teleology from moral discussion or any shared ideas about what a human life is for, in other words, when a view from nowhere becomes your biggest goal in moral conversation, then what we end up with is something like a hellscape of emotivism, kind of world we live in today, he thinks. A world where people in good faith often have what looks like moral conversation, but they almost always end up with something at the end of it that's deeply unsatisfying and barely productive. Moral conversation becomes incommensurable, he says, without a shared conception of the good. And if this is what he tried to diagnose about the world in