Alasdair MacIntyre, Plain Persons | Plain Persons as Proto-Aristotelians | Philosophy Core Concepts

This is a video in my new Core Concepts series -- designed to provide students and lifelong learners a brief discussion focused on one main concept from a classic philosophical text and thinker.

This Core Concept video focuses on Alasdair MacIntyre's essay "Plain Persons and Moral Philosophy", and discusses his contention that plain persons are often what he calls "proto-Aristotelians" in their broad commitments embodying moral theory, rather than simply neutral blank slates. MacIntyre writes:

"[T]he plain person is funda­mentally a proto-Aristotelian. What is the force of'fundamentally'here? What it conveys can be expressed in three claims, first that every human being either lives out her or his life in a narrative form which is structured in terms of a tews, of virtues and of rules in an Aristotelian mode or has disrupted that narrative by committing her or himself to some other way of life, which is best understood as an alternative designed to avoid or escape from an Aristotelian mode of life, so that the lives of those who understand themselves, explicitly or much more probably implicitly, in terms set by Kant or Reid or Sidgwick or Sartre, are still informed by this rejected alternative.

Thirdly, as these first two claims imply, I am also committed to holding that every human being is potentially a fully-fledged and not merely a proto-Aristotelian and that the frustration of that potentiality is among his or her morally important characteristics. We should therefore expect to find, within those who have not been allowed to develop, or have not themselves allowed their lives to develop, an Aristotelian form, a crucial and ineliminable tension between that in them which is and that which is not, Aristotelian. The standard modem anti-Aristotelian self will be a particular kind of divided self, exhibiting that complexity so characteristic of and so prized by modernity."

#MacIntyre #AfterVirtue #Virtue #Ethics #PlainPersons #MoralTheory #Narrative #Aristotelianism #Philosophy #Practices #Rules

[SeekingApatheia]

I've really been enjoying rediscovering MacIntyre lately. His historically informed approach to moral philosophy is so rare. Criminally so.

[quiensera]

Great insight from a text I otherwise wouldn't have gotten to anytime soon