Abstract
Alasdair MacIntyre’s work has been called “striking” and “stunning.” MacIntyre’s exceptional strength as a philosopher is his sting. We lack, he argues, both a shared conception of what it means to live well together and a way to engage one another rationally in a common pursuit of excellent living. Having convinced ourselves that there is no rational way to converse about our common quest for lives that are excellent and meaningful, we are lost — to a degree that may be unprecedented. In MacIntyre’s writing, the manager emerges as a central character. The manager MacIntyre describes seems stuck with the motivational pursuit of success and unable to pursue human excellence for its own sake. Engaging, criticizing, and extending MacIntyre’s arguments is difficult but worthwhile.
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Notes
Quoted on the back cover of J. Horton and S. Mendus (eds) (1994) After MacIntyre: Critical Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press).
S. Hauerwas (2007) “The Virtues of Alasdair MacIntyre,” First Things, 37 October.
Quoted on the back cover of A. MacIntyre (1999a) Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Open Court).
T. D’Andrea (2006) Tradition, Rationality, and Virtue (London: Ashgate), 397.
For critical perspectives on MacIntyre’s interpretations of other thinkers, see J. Horton and S. Mendus (eds) (1994) and J. Davenport and A. Rudd (eds) (2001) Kierkegaard After MacIntyre (Chicago: Open Court).
For critical perspectives on MacIntyre’s treatment of the natural moral law, see L. Cunningham (ed.) (2009) Intractable Disputes about the Natural Law (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame); for essays more sympathetic with MacIntyre’s contributions to moral and political philosophy.
P. Blackledge and K. Knight (eds) (2011) Virtue and Politics: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Revolutionary Aristotelianism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press).
A number of helpful book-length works engage MacIntyre’s work. In addition to Thomas D’Andrea (2006), see P. McMylor (1994) Alasdair MacIntyre: Critic of Modernity (New York: Routledge).
B. Ballard (2000) Understanding MacIntyre (Lanham, MD: University Press of America).
C. Lutz (2004) Tradition in the Ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre: Relativism, Thomism, and Philosophy (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books).
C. Lutz (2012) Reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (London: Continuum).
J. Cornwell (2010) “MacIntyre on Money,” Prospect, 176, 58–61.
See A. MacIntyre (1977a), 217–237 (arguing that the cost-benefit analysis of the bureaucratic manager is utilitarian in character, is not value-neutral, and rests on the shortcomings and presuppositions of utilitarian practical reasoning); A. MacIntyre (1979a), 122–135 (arguing that corporations require executives to embody incompatible traits); A. MacIntyre (1979b) “Social Science Methodology as the Ideology of Bureacratic Authority,” in M. J. Falco (ed.) Through the Looking Glass: Epistemology and the Conduct of Enquiry. An Anthology (Washington, DC: University Press of America), 42–58 (arguing that social scientific theorists and bureaucratic managers mask in similar ways their shared inability to predict social outcomes in a rational manner).
A. MacIntyre (1990a) Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopedia, Geneaology, Tradition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press).
For a sobering and perhaps too dark account of the apparent decline of the influence of the “tradition” at Catholic universities, see J. Burtchaell (1998) The Dying of the Light (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans), 563–633.
See A. MacIntyre (1984) “Postscript to the Second Edition,” in After Virtue, 273–278.
Also see J. Haldane, “MacIntyre’s Thomist Revival: What Next?” in J. Horton and S. Mendus (eds) (1994) After MacIntyre, especially pp. 96–99.
It is a curiosity that MacIntyre’s virtue ethic has seemed susceptible to an objection based on the example of Eichmann because, as we will see, MacIntyre used Eichmann as an example both before and after the publication of After Virtue. See MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics, 207–208, and A. MacIntyre (1999b) “Social Structures and Their Threat to Moral Agency,” Philosophy, 74, 311ff.
I see two main responses that MacIntyre offers, prior to Dependent Rational Animals. In both Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions, MacIntyre argues that the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition has the resources to engage with and consider objections from rival moral traditions in a way that its main competitor traditions lack. The other strategy is to show that virtue ethics is accompanied by, and part of, the natural law tradition, and thus to emphasize first principles (which are not relative in themselves, although there is an element of relativity in the way that the first principles of the natural law are known by and appropriated by each human person). See for example the Marquette Aquinas lecture, A. MacIntyre (1990b) First Principles, Final Ends, and Contemporary Philosophical Issues (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press).
A. MacIntyre (2007) “Prologue to the Third Edition,” in After Virtue, ix.
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Beabout, G.R. (2013). MacIntyre, Our Gadfly. In: The Character of the Manager. Humanism in Business Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137304063_4
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