Episode #246 ... The Myth of the Self-Made Person - 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 lot of people living in the world today that have learned to hate pieces of themselves because of things they've accepted over the years about what it means to be a good person. A good person, they're told, is someone who is strong, independent. They don't ask for exceptions to be made for them. They stay healthy, they show up to work every day, and they become a rock that is a fixture in everyone's life that endlessly provides for all the people around them. There's obviously much more to this image of a good person that most people accept, and for the rest of the episode, let's call this image the sort of common sense version of what a human being is supposed to be like. Because if the job of a good philosopher is to disrupt our common sense, then reframe something and get us to see the thing in a new, more detailed way, then Alasdair MacIntyre, in the book we're covering today, does just that when it comes to the assumptions we make about what existing as a human being is even like. If you've listened to the last two episodes, which I highly recommend before this one, then you know he believes that any moral claim about how we should or shouldn't be acting is always rooted in a way of life and a moral tradition that we need to be self-aware of. Well, this whole book is written by him, starting from the foundation of Aristotelian Thomism, a sort of late Middle Ages, early Renaissance blend of the work of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. And if the common sense view of what it is to be a person is rooted mostly in assumptions built out of Enlightenment liberalism and how it thinks of the modern subject,