Alasdair Maclntyre's A.fier Virtue' conveys good news and bad news. The bad news is that contempo... more Alasdair Maclntyre's A.fier Virtue' conveys good news and bad news. The bad news is that contemporary moral theory is mired in emotivism, subjectivism and relativism and the moral consensus needed to make objectively grounded value judgments is long gone. Our current situation is one of interminable moral debate, in which issues vital to our concerns can never be non-arbitrarily decided. The good news is that a solution is possible. If we move away from ethical theories which focus primarily on acts and the rightness and toward an Aristotlean theory of character and its virtues and vices. then we might be able to enjoy more objective moral judgments once again. The bad news about Maclntyre's good news is that his approach as it stands does not work. Maclntyre's own account of the virtues falls prey t o the same sort of relativism in moral judgments that he criticizes in other moral theories. I will suggest that, for Maclntyre, relativism can be avoided only by falling back onto a version of an ideal observer theory, and that Maclntyre has implicitly adopted some such view. This paper falls into three parts. I n the first section, I briefly describe Maclntyre's account of virtues. The second section shows how this account is subject to the charge of relativism. The final part describes the elements of the ideal observer view implicit in Maclntyre's work. I Emotivism is Maclntyre's all-embracing term for the bulk of twentieth century Anglo-American moral philosophy. Maclntyre almost casually dismisses contemporary attempts to provide rational foundations for moral judgments.' He also glosses over the differences in various non-cognitivist theories. There is nothing but theory of language which separates these theories. What they share is relativism: the view that for each ethical claim C, there is an apparent contradictory C', and there is no neutral objective manner by which the conflict Susan Feldman receivedher Ph. D. from the University u/Rochester in 1980; since that time she has been teaching in the Phi1osoph.v Department at Dickinson College. Her current area of research involves the problem of relativism.
Alasdair Maclntyre's A.fier Virtue' conveys good news and bad news. The bad news is that contempo... more Alasdair Maclntyre's A.fier Virtue' conveys good news and bad news. The bad news is that contemporary moral theory is mired in emotivism, subjectivism and relativism and the moral consensus needed to make objectively grounded value judgments is long gone. Our current situation is one of interminable moral debate, in which issues vital to our concerns can never be non-arbitrarily decided. The good news is that a solution is possible. If we move away from ethical theories which focus primarily on acts and the rightness and toward an Aristotlean theory of character and its virtues and vices. then we might be able to enjoy more objective moral judgments once again. The bad news about Maclntyre's good news is that his approach as it stands does not work. Maclntyre's own account of the virtues falls prey t o the same sort of relativism in moral judgments that he criticizes in other moral theories. I will suggest that, for Maclntyre, relativism can be avoided only by falling back onto a version of an ideal observer theory, and that Maclntyre has implicitly adopted some such view. This paper falls into three parts. I n the first section, I briefly describe Maclntyre's account of virtues. The second section shows how this account is subject to the charge of relativism. The final part describes the elements of the ideal observer view implicit in Maclntyre's work. I Emotivism is Maclntyre's all-embracing term for the bulk of twentieth century Anglo-American moral philosophy. Maclntyre almost casually dismisses contemporary attempts to provide rational foundations for moral judgments.' He also glosses over the differences in various non-cognitivist theories. There is nothing but theory of language which separates these theories. What they share is relativism: the view that for each ethical claim C, there is an apparent contradictory C', and there is no neutral objective manner by which the conflict Susan Feldman receivedher Ph. D. from the University u/Rochester in 1980; since that time she has been teaching in the Phi1osoph.v Department at Dickinson College. Her current area of research involves the problem of relativism.
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