After Virtue

It's about protecting.

Like, these are the virtues that we've lost, and, and, uh, you know, uh, there's a philosopher named Alasdair MacIntyre that wrote a book called After Virtue.

You know, it's, it's very difficult to have, like, like, conservatism, this is my issue with it, is that conservatism without virtue, what is it? You, [laughs] you know, Francis Schaeffer said conservative humanism is, is still humanism.

It doesn't matter the color or the variation of it.

There you go.

Have you heard of the book called After Virtue by Alistair McIntyre?

No.

It's too hard a book to read.

It's a great book.

What's the book? Read it somewhere.

After Virtue, Alistair McIntyre, Alistair with a D.

Just read a review of it.

It's one of the more important philosophical works of the 20th century.

It's called After Virtue.

And he recognizes that we had a culture that built up a set of moral emotions, hence the word virtue, okay? Right.

So he's working in virtue ethics and he's recognizing that our moral emotions have been shaped with this framework, right? And it's – I mean, he sees this – It's either Christian or Aristotelian, and there's a bit of overlap between those two things.

But you cannot endlessly inherit its moral conclusions without eventually having to explain what it is that makes them true.

Alasdair MacIntyre made a similar argument in his book After Virtue.

He looked at modern moral discourse and suggested we've inherited fragments of an older moral tradition.

We still have the words, he says, justice, virtue, dignity, duty, rights, but the actual framework that gave those words collective meaning has entirely fractured, and that's where modern Britain is today.

Ratzinger was too polite to point out these terms at the time, but his Westminster speech pointed exactly to this unraveling.

Alasdair MacIntyre has a book, After Virtue.

He described western moral culture as emotivist.

By this, what he meant was the moral debate at that point had been reduced to little more than shouting of preferences.

You don't see this? It's everywhere, and it happens slowly.

The philosopher, McKendree, spent a good part of his career diagnosing exactly this collapse, especially in a 1981 book called After Virtue.

He argued that modern moral language has been quietly hollowed into what he called emotivism.

It's the theory functioning almost invisibly beneath the surface of ordinary conversation that a moral claim is nothing more than an expression of personal preference or feelings dressed up in the grammar of objective argument.