• Journal of Korean Philosophical Society
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• v.137
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• pp.57-79
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• 2016

The purpose of this paper is to explain MacIntyre's critique of moral pluralism of modern society and reveal the limits of his critique of liberalism. It is a distinctive feature of the social and cultural order that we inhabit that disagreements over central moral issues are peculiarly unsettleable. Debates concerned with the value of human life such as those over abortion and euthanasia, or about distributive justice and property rights, or about war and peace degenerate into confrontations of assertion and counter-assertion because the protagonists of rival positions invoke incommensurable forms of moral assertion against each other. We usually call this situation 'modern moral pluralism' and concede as the natural outcome of the activities of human reason under free institution. But in After Virtue, MacIntyre vigorously criticizes modern moral pluralism. The main cause he took which brought about this state of affairs was the failure of 'the Enlightenment project'. According to MacIntyre, the Enlightenment project which has dominated philosophy for the past three hundred years promised a conception of rationality independent of historical and social context, and independent of any specific understanding of man's nature or purpose. But not only has that promise in fact been unfulfilled, the project is itself fundamentally flawed and the promise could never be fulfilled. In consequence, modern moral and political thought are in a state of disarray from which they can be rescued only if we revert to an Aristotelian paradigm, with its essential commitment, and construct an account of practical reason premised on that commitment. But one of the deepest difficulties with the argument of After Virtue is that the very extent of its critique of the modern world seems to cast doubt on the possibility of any realistic revival under the conditions of modernity of the Aristotelianism which MacIntyre advocates. Especially when we consider we are not only the characters found in our narratives but also we ourselves are the author of our own narratives. Moral pluralism is not seen as disaster but rather as the natural outcome of the activities of human reason under enduring free institutions.