Ethics

After Virtue

By Alastair McIntyre, this book sets out an account of virtue ethics. A quality possesses virtue in his sense if it satisfies these three criteria:

• It is an integral part of some practice(s)
• The goods of the practices are integrated into an overall pattern of goals for leading the best kind of life
• The goods of particular lives are themselves integhrated into the overall patterns of a living tradition informed by a quest for the good and the best

McIntyre is at pains to point out that all these elements are necessary - this makes sense in that otherwise you don't get a conceptual link between the qualities and the highest-level good/best.

This necessarily rests very heavily on the concept of telos of ends/goals towarads which things are best understood as being directed.

Enlightenment morality is viewed as inadequate since it lacks this notion, so there is no way to justify one set of rules or utilitarian calculus over another.

More generally, modern morality is viewed as lacking a narrative, that is sited in terms of connections to other lives and to their goods, which can be used to make sense of actions in terms of their relation to the over-arching telos of the good and the bad.

The attraction of this to me is the highly analogue/interconnected nature, requiring ethics to be treated as being embedded in a rich history of human interaction with a notion of telos, as opposed to the analytical/atomised approach of denying the self (Erwin Goffman), denying the importance of social embedding (Nietzsche), or attempts to produce telos-free ideas of "the good", e.g. via the Golden Rule or the Rawlsian Veil Of Ignorance - the sort of "background-independent" approach that physical theories take

There is a truth here, just not the whole trith. I think that the more analytic/atmmoised approaches also have truth. Can Parfitt provide a synthesis here?