| In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre suggested that our modern moral practice is in crisis. Our current condition is the result of an historical progression of attempts to provide rational foundations for an objective morality, beginning with what he calls 'the Enlightenment project'---the combined efforts of Hume, Kant and Kierkegaard---and followed by the post-Enlightenment efforts of the utilitarians and neo-Kantians. In the wake of the failure of these efforts, MacIntyre argues that we are left with but two theoretical alternatives to the Enlightenment project: a return to a scheme of moral inquiry that is Aristotelian in its form, or the rejection of the enterprise of seeking rational foundations for morality, which was suggested by Nietzsche.;In this study I follow MacIntyre in aiming to show that moral inquiry must be of a specific form if what flows from it---a substantive project concerning particular problems or tensions arising within or between particular socio-political contexts or traditions---is to be rationally justifiable. This form has already been specified in part by MacIntyre, so my work in the dissertation involves examining and defending the key features of MacIntyre's Aristotelian form of moral inquiry, as well as noting other sources of influence at work in MacIntyre's moral philosophy, particularly the works of John Dewey and Ludwig Wittgenstein.;Additionally, I aim to show that moral inquiry of the form endorsed by MacIntyre, if we acknowledge its Deweyan and Wittgensteinian roots, could have application to a diversity of substantive projects in a variety of (perhaps all) traditions. The vindication of these two closely related theses, I shall argue, will take MacIntyre's project into new territory by opening the way to pluralism at the level of substantive inquiry. |
