He's got a cool name and I started reading after virtue yesterday. The prologue was interesting and it sounds like he has good critiques of modern moral thought. However, in the prelude he says that Marxism needs a moral base to avoid repeating the "mistakes" of "stalinism."
Here's a passage I liked:
spoiler
How then, if at all, might the protagonists of one of these traditions
hope to defeat the claims of any of its rivals? A necessary first step would
be for them to come to understand what it is to think in the terms pre-
scribed by that particular rival tradition, to learn how to think as if one
were a convinced adherent of that rival tradition. To do this requires the
exercise of a capacity for philosophical imagination that is often lacking.
A second step is to identify, from the standpoint of the adherents of that
rival tradition, its crucially important unresolved issues and unsolved
problems - unresolved and unsolved by the standards of that tradition
which now confront those adherents and to enquire how progress might
be made in moving towards their resolution and solution. It is when, in
spite of systematic enquiry, issues and problems that are of crucial impor-
tance to some tradition remain unresolved and unsolved that a question
arises about it, namely, just why it is that progress in this area is no longer
being made. Is it perhaps because that tradition lacks the resources to ad-
dress those issues and solve those problems and is unable to acquire them
so long as it remains faithful to its own standard and presuppositions? Is
it perhaps that constraints imposed by those standards and deriving from
those presuppositions themselves prevent the formulation or reformula-
tion of those issues and problems so that they can be adequately addressed
and solved? And, if the answer to those two questions is 'Yes', is it perhaps
the case that it is only from the standpoint of some rival tradition that this
predicament can be understood and from the resources of that same rival
tradition that the means of overcoming this predicament can be found?
When the adherents of a tradition are able through such acts of imagi-
nation and questioning to interrogate some particular rival tradition, it is
always possible that they may be able to conclude, indeed that they may
be compelled to conclude, that it is only from the standpoint of their own
tradition that the difficulties of that rival tradition can be adequately un-
derstood and overcome. It is only if the central theses of their own tradi-
tion are true and its arguments sound, that this rival tradition can be
expected to encounter just those difficulties that it has encountered and
that its lack of conceptual, normative, and other resources to deal with
these difficulties can be explained. So it is possible for one such tradition
to defeat another in respect of the adequacy of its claims to truth and to
rational justification, even though there are no neutral standards available
by appeal to which any rational agent whatsoever could determine which
tradition is superior to which.
Yet, just because are no such neutral standards, the protagonists of a de
feated tradition may not recognize, and may not be able to recognize, that
such a defeat has occurred. They may well recognize that they confront
problems of their own to which no fully satisfactory solution has as yet
been advanced, but it may be that nothing compels them to go any further
than this. They will still take themselves to have excellent reasons for re-
jecting any invitation to adopt the standpoint of any other rival and in-
compatible tradition, even in imagination, for if the basic principles that
they now assert are true and rationally justified, as they take them to be,
then those assertions advanced by adherents of rival traditions that are in-
compatible with their own must be false and must lack rational justifica-
tion. So they will continue - perhaps indefinitely - to defend their own
positions and to proceed with their own enquiries, unable to recognize
that those enquiries are in fact condemned to sterility and frustration.
It is of course important that for very, very long periods of time rival
traditions of moral enquiry may coexist, as Thomistic Aristotelianism,
Madhyamaka Buddhism, and modern European and North American
utilitarianism have coexisted, without any one of them having had occa-
sion to take the claims of its rivals seriously, let alone having conducted
the kind of enquiry that might issue in one of these traditions suffering ra-
tional defeat at the hands of another. And it is also true that such an en-
quiry may not in fact lead to any definitive outcome, so that the issues
dividing those rival traditions may remain undecided. Yet what matters
most is that such issues can on occasion be decided, and this in a way that
makes it evident that the claims of such rival traditions from the outset
presuppose the falsity of relativism. As do I and as must any serious en-
quirer.
It reminds me of how it makes far more sense to approach the anarchist with the idea that we have the same goal, but they have difficulty reaching it. In reality our projects have done well at moving in a very good direction by the standards of their abstract principals. Thus, they should support AES in the least, or join us. There will still be some that will refuse to hear any criticism and carry on with whatever foolish activities, but it works better than saying "you stupid idealist liberal child, abandon your label at once!"
Has anyone here read the whole book, or his other work, and is Macintyre worth it?
Uvuzela