- Alasdair MacIntyre…Critic of Modernity -
Alasdair MacIntyre is a critic of modern morality. He believes that in our modern culture we have shaken loose of the Aristotelian-Christian worldview, and we have not been provided by anything from the Enlightenment that takes its place to fill in the gaps where rational versus non-rational discourse about morality is concerned. Our past, according to MacIntyre, is narrative and story, suspect for the moral conclusions made, but a necessary part of our modern interpretation of morality because we remain conscious of past human life. Because of a lack of any universal, homogenous moral theory that allows us to validly answer moral debates one way or another, MacIntyre feels that our modern system of ethics is no more than the arbitrary will of people imposing their arbitrary preferences upon others. This can certainly be seen in the areas of abortion and gay rights as moral dilemmas in our modern culture:
Since moral norms had come loose from their moorings in an Aristotelian-Christian worldview, and since the Enlightenment had provided no effective substitutes-that is, no warrants that could resolve moral debates-people have been molding moral convictions simply on the basis of arbitrary personal preferences, manifesting their will to power. Thus, the various forms of emotivism are reinterpreted; they should not be seen as theories of moral discourse and belief but merely as a reflection of the general absence of workable justifications in a particular historical epoch.
This paper will be an analysis and discussion of MacIntyre’s critique regarding modern morality. This analysis will conclude that there is no way to rationally discourse about values when values are individually and socially formed, as opposed to being Divine or inherent knowledge and universally similar and provable for all individuals in their quest to know irrefutably what the “good” is. A conclusion...