Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative

Alasdair MacIntyre explores some central philosophical, political and moral claims of modernity and argues that a proper understanding of human goods requires a rejection of these claims. In a wide-ranging discussion, he considers how normative and evaluative judgments are to be understood, how desire and practical reasoning are to be characterized, what it is to have adequate self-knowledge, and what part narrative plays in our understanding of human lives. He asks, further, what it would be to understand the modern condition from a neo-Aristotelian or Thomistic perspective, and argues that Thomistic Aristotelianism, informed by Marx's insights, provides us with resources for constructing a contemporary politics and ethics which both enable and require us to act against modernity from within modernity. This rich and important book builds on and advances MacIntyre's thinking in ethics and moral philosophy, and will be of great interest to readers in both fields.

Preface; 1. Desires, goods, and 'good', the philosophical issues; 2. Theory, practice, and their social contexts; 3. Morality and modernity; 4. Neo-Aristotelian ethics and politics developed in contemporary Thomistic terms: issues of relevance and rational justification; 5. Four narratives; Index.

Alasdair MacIntyre retired from teaching at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana in 2010. He is the author of the award-winning After Virtue (1981), and his other publications include two volumes of essays, The Tasks of Philosophy and Ethics and Politics (both Cambridge, 2006), Edith Stein: A Philosophical Prologue, 1913–1922 (2005), and God, Philosophy, Universities: A History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition (2009).