Virtue Ethics - MacIntyre

ALASDAIR MACINTYRE ARGUED THAT...

Morality has lost it's way

"Imagine a terrorist has taken your children, the Prime Minister and an atomic bomb. He threatens to use the bomb unless..."

These sorts of moral dilemmas force us to choose between keeping absolute rules that we want to live by (e.g. "do not kill") and the prevention of harm. So to Macintyre ethics has become a bizarre "lose-lose" game that many of us and simply stopped playing...

MACINTYRE urges us too... remember where ethics came from.

• We need to understand the historical context of ethics and its DEVELOPMENT...(so please explore other ethical teachers such as Aristotle, Phillia Foot, Elizabeth Anscome, Martha Nussbaum in order to compare and explain how virtue ethics has been developed)
• The context is also important for understanding issues. Macintyre doesn't like "quandry ethics" where theories are tested by looking at implausable dilemmas. However he does want ethics to do it's job and tell us how we ought to live our lives.
• So finding out about the context of an issue helps us to understand the decisions people make (teleological)

RELATIVE VALUES...

It follows from this that different societies…