Alasdair MacIntyre Quotes

#1. Moral judgments are linguistic survivals from the practices of classical theism which have lost the context provided by these practices.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#2. At least some of the items in a Homeric list of the aretai would clearly not be counted by most of us nowadays as virtues at all, physical strength being the most obvious example.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#3. The true genre of the life is neither hagiography nor saga, but tragedy.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#4. What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?

Alasdair MacIntyre

#5. To call the Form [of the Good] eternal is misleading: that something lasts forever does not render it any the better, any more than long-enduring whiteness is whiter than ephemeral whiteness.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#6. The characterization of actions allegedly prior to any narrative form being imposed upon them will always turn out to be the presentation of what are plainly the disjointed parts of some possible narrative.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#7. The attempted professionalization of serious and systematic thinking has had a disastrous effect upon our culture

Alasdair MacIntyre

#8. I can be said truly to know who and what I am only because there are others who can be said truly to know who and what I am.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#9. The mock rationality of the debate conceals the arbitrariness of the will and power at work in its resolution. It

Alasdair MacIntyre

#10. What our laws show is the extent and degree to which conflict has to be suppressed.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#11. Those emotive theorists who said that the function of moral utterance was to evince emotion would ... have been correct if they had substituted the indefinite for the definite article.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#12. A striking feature of moral and political argument in the modern world is the extent to which it is innovators, radicals, and revolutionaries who revive old doctrines, while their conservative and reactionary opponents are the inventors of new ones.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#13. History is neither a prison nor a museum, nor is it a set of materials for self-congratulation.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#14. The exercise of the virtues is itself a crucial component of the good life for man

Alasdair MacIntyre

#15. All power tends to coopt, and absolute power coopts absolutely.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#16. The way to bring out the best in the British people is to attack them.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#17. We are so accustomed to classifying judgments, arguments and deeds in terms of morality that we forget how relatively new the notion was in the culture of the Enlightenment.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#18. Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#19. The choice between the ethical and the aesthetic is not the choice between good and evil, it is the choice whether or not to choose in terms of good and evil.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#20. Morality which is no particular socity's morality is to be found nowhere.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#21. Christians have given atheists less and less in which to disbelieve

Alasdair MacIntyre

#22. Modern systematic politics, whether liberal, conservative, radical or socialist, simply has to be rejected from a standpoint that owes genuine allegiance to the tradition of the virtues; for modern politics itself expresses in its institutional forms a systematic rejection of that tradition.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#23. To cry out that the emperor had no clothes on was at least to pick on one man only to the amusement of everyone else; to declare that almost everyone is dressed in rags is much less likely to be popular.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#24. But the concept of a person is that of a character abstracted from a history.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#25. [M]odern society is indeed often, at least in surface appearance, nothing but a collection of strangers, each pursuing his or her own interests under minimal constraints.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#26. For Kant one can be both good and stupid; but for Aristotle stupidity of a certain kind precludes goodness.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#27. The present is intelligible only as a commentary upon and response to the past in which the past, if necessary and if possible, is corrected and transcended,

Alasdair MacIntyre

#28. It is only by participation in a rational, practice-based community that one becomes rational.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#29. The introduction of the word 'intuition' by a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone badly wrong with an argument.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#30. ... it is not just that moral conclusions can not be justified in the way that they once were ; but the loss of the possibility of such justification signals a correlative change in the meaning of moral idioms

Alasdair MacIntyre

#31. Augustine's final verdict on the philosophers of Greece
and Rome was that, although they had made various mistakes, "nature itself has not permitted them to wander too far from the path of truth" in their judgments about the supreme good (De Civitate Dei 19.1).

Alasdair MacIntyre

#32. Indeed from an Aristotelian point of view a modern liberal political society can appear only as a collection of citizens of nowhere who have banded together for their common protection.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#33. I have confronted theoretical positions whose protagonists claim that what I take to be historically produced characteristics of what is specifically modern are in fact the timelessly necessary characteristics of all and any moral judgment, of all and any selfhood.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#34. At the foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements the truth of which no further reason can be given.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#35. What this brings out is that modern politics cannot be a matter of genuine moral consensus. And it is not. Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means,

Alasdair MacIntyre

#36. Truth has been displaced as a value and replaced by psychological effectiveness.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#37. Modern conservatives are for the most part engaged in conserving only older rather than later versions of liberal individualism. Their own core doctrine is as liberal and as individualist as that of self-avowed liberals.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#38. We are not waiting for a Godot, but for another-doubtless very different-St. Benedict.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#39. The good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man, and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to understand what more and what else the good life for man is.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#40. Facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth century invention.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#41. We are never more (and sometimes less) than the co-authors of our own narratives.

Alasdair MacIntyre

#42. Would certainly not have admired Jesus Christ and he would have been horrified by St Paul - does

Alasdair MacIntyre

#43. Charles II once invited the members of the Royal Society to explain to him why a dead fish weighs more than the same fish alive; a number of subtle explanations were offered to him. He then pointed out that it does not.

Alasdair MacIntyre