Research On Macintyre’s Virtue Theory

The paper will trace back to Macintyre’s virtue theory and reflect this moral crisis in the field of people’s social life and culture, based on his historicism research methods and the analysis about the disorder condition. Then, Macintyre came up with the social and theoretical reason. Through this process, Macintyre found the choice that we must turn back to Aristotle’s virtue tradition. After the statement of the various virtue traditions, such as the Heroic age, Athens, Middle Ages, Aristotlelism and so on, Macintyre put forward his moral theory at last, which involves the relationship between virtue and practice, virtue and character unity, virtue and tradition. Up to this point, a new virtue concept was born. What Macintyre has done gives us a lot of enlightening significance.Nevertheless, the reality and the contradiction of this theory are being questioned. To solve the above problems, Macintyre made great progress again.He resorts to the practice ideology of Marx which makes the transcendence from the community to civil society come true and structures a common community which fuses individualism and communitarianism. The later explains the incommensurability between different virtue traditions by means of the human animality, which includes vulnerability and dependence. The human animality make the relationship between people is the giving and receiving relationship. It is this relationship that makes commensurability probable.Following the present and the perfection of the theory, we can know that what Macintyre has done gives us a great deal of theoretical value and beneficial enlightenment. Just because of the similar social moral situation and the similar historical trend, I hope we can acquire some guiding significances for our moral construction by means of the interpretation of Macintyre’s virtue theory.