Virtue, practices, and traditions › Why the Enlightenment argument matters

MacIntyre's historical argument concerns attempts to justify inherited moral requirements after rejecting the account of human fulfillment that had helped explain their purpose. In the Aristotelian scheme he reconstructs, we distinguish human beings as they presently are from what they could become through realizing their ends. Ethics concerns the dispositions and education needed for that transformation. An end, or telos, is what an activity or a life is directed toward; it need not be an external prize.

He argues that removing the account of human fulfillment while retaining moral injunctions leaves a justification problem (chapters 4–6). Why should human beings with their existing desires accept these requirements? His discussions of Hume and Kant test different proposed answers. The challenge concerns the relationship between their inherited moral conclusions and the grounds offered for them. Accepting this criticism requires assessing his readings of those thinkers, rather than treating their projects as obviously unsuccessful.

The diagnosis is broader than a claim that modern people have forgotten a list of virtues. Recovering the vocabulary would not be enough. MacIntyre wants to recover an account of the activities, relationships, and human purposes that make virtues intelligible. His constructive argument therefore begins with forms of activity in which a participant can learn to distinguish apparent success from genuine achievement.