Combatting ethical relativism: Macintyre's use of coherence and progress

American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 75, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 61-82

  Rice, Eugene ^a  

^a MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84880564769     PISSN: 10513558     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/acpq20017512     Document Type: Article

References (17)

1. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd edition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). Abbreviated hereafter AV. In addition to essays written in direct response to such published challenges, some of which will be covered later, substantive sections of MacIntyre's later books also offer rebuttals.
2. For instance see: Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988) [abbreviated WJWR hereafter]
3. and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990) [abbreviated TRVME hereafter].
4. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly
5. who pointed out that not every person or tradition is in a position to judge. For instance, MacIntyre believes that some traditions lack the awareness of the tradition-bound nature of their own beliefs. I will explore some of the other requirements below. For a succinct statement of the claim that universal claims are still possible, see Alasdair MacIntyre, "Precis of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?' Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 51(March 1991):149-51, at 152.
6. We will cover some of the literature shortly, however for a recent sustained consideration of MacIntyre's larger project see Lisa Bellantoni, Moral Progress: A Process Critique of MacIntyre (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000).
7. AV, 265-66.
8. John Horton and Susan Mendus, "Alasdair MacIntyre: After Virtue and After", in After MacIntyre, ed. Horton and Mendus (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), 1-13, at 11. Hereafter I will abbreviate this volume of essays and MacIntyre's responses simply as AM.
9. WJWR, 2.
10. See chapter two of E J. Bond, Ethics and Human Well-Being (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1996).
11. TRVME, 5.
12. AM, 292-93.
13. David Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundation of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 103.
14. Consult MacIntyre's work in AM, 295 and following.
15. Robert Stern "MacIntyre and Historicism", AM, 146-60.
16. See, for instance, Michael Devitt, Realism and Truth (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991).
17. Neil Levy, "Stepping Into the Present: MacIntyre's Modernity", Social Theory and Practice 25(1999):467-90.