Partially Examined Life podcast - MacIntyre on Moral Theory
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 ก.ค. 2012
- On Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1981), mostly ch. 3-7 and 14-17.
What justifies ethical claims? MacIntyre claims that no modern attempt to ground ethics has worked, and that's because we've abandoned Aristotle. We see facts and values as fundamentally different: the things science discovers vs. these weird things that have nothing to do with science. In Aristotle's teleological view, everything comes with built-in goals, so just as a plant will aim grow green and healthy, people have a definite kind of virtue towards which we do and should naturally strive. Though MacIntyre doesn't want to bring back Aristotle's biology, he does want to put the goal-directedness, i.e. the normativity, back into our conception of the facts of our lives.
You can find the entire unabridged MacIntyre podcast, along with dozens of others discussing philosophers from Aristotle to Wittgenstein, at the Partially Examined Life website: www.partiallyexaminedlife.com
About PEL: The podcasters were all graduate students in philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin back in the Clinton years. They all left the program at some point before getting their doctorates and have consequently since had time to get outside that whole weird world of academia and reflect on it and the various philosophical topics with a different, and probably much more lazy, perspective.
Hey y'all, I'm not through with this podcast but already I feel the need to just say I think it's awesome and truly informative and didactic. I'm a history student (college) from Argentina and I'm currently taking an Ethics course on the University of Buenos Aires. We're covering the basics and I choose to relate Aristotle and Nietzsche for my paper; that's where MacIntyre comes in for me, so thx! Thumbs up on the podcast!
The fact-value distinction, as far as I can see, is dependent on there being a level of reality, the 'factual' level, that is beyond interpretation, an atomistic level of reality.
The two propositions fail together. Envisioning reality in terms of equations and mathematical relations is itself an interpretation of the real, and mathematics itself requires interpretive motivations taken from the real world. Hence, 'fact' fails to establish a place for itself that can claim to be outside and 'above' considerations of value.
As for Macintyre, he abandoned the project of grounding human virtue independently from biology and elaborated upon his ideas of virtue in his subsequent books.
I am not sure how long ago this podcast first aired, but I would be interested to hear these gentlemen discuss more about the topic of the fact/value distinction. Hilary Putnam's treatment of this subject in his book "The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy" comes to mind as a candidate text.
Its not just that there is a health and an unhealthy option for every plant and person, but that to the extent the plant and person are healthy they are truly themselves. As the plants flowers rot or the human being succumbs to alcoholism they become less fully, less really, what they are… so it is not a separable judgement about what we like, to say this or that is good or bad… rather goodness and badness touch the being of the life before us.
There's no middle ground between a living physics (ancient) and a substantial morality… and the identification of "personal judgements" or ethics as mere taste.
To embrace the ancient, deeper view of life you have to reject the presumption that empirical experiments (modern science) captures the essential reality of anything whatsoever. To (loosely) quote Schelling, laboratory experimentation is death.
(the sociopath who says he is exempt from morality because he is not a human being is lying.)
I'd love to see an episode on your thoughts of freuds ego and id theory. Maybe go over some of his book on the topic. (I forget what the book is called)
where is the rest of this conversation? it just fades out .. :(
The full episode is on their website
Check the description.
It's monumentally *silly* to say that there's a moral prescription that you should NEVER EVER kill anyone EVER.
I'd kill the one to save 5 and sleep like a baby (but no, I'm not a Utilitarian).
If the polis has to agree on morality, is there room to grow+change? I.e., from a slave-owning aristocracy to a free market capitalism?
Would/could science have (partly) broken the hold of superstition without the Enlightenment?
Good question! However, it doesn't have to agree, only to a significant degree which gets things going. Dissent and searching questions should be welcome. See, for example, MacIntyre's "Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good"
...This discussion proves the first point in the video, modern discussions in ethics are waists of time that missed the point, by having to entertain every possible view point, you have made it impossible to have any meaningful take always from the topic. A list of different things people believe is not useful. It is not a conclusion.