MacIntyre's Virtue Ethics v. the Postmodern Simulacra
Virtue has been understood in myriad and often conflicting ways across history. This apparent fragmentation lends support to the thin moral theories of modernity, which tend to reduce virtue to a utilitarian tool or a relativistic preference. Alasdair MacIntyre challenges this view by excavating the common core that runs through virtue’s apparently disparate historical conceptions, thereby restoring its objective character (MacIntyre 2007, 181–203). Every definition of virtue presupposes a conceptual background against which it is defined. These concepts, if traced back deeply enough, converge to a single shared notion: that of “practice”, which unifies all the modes of understanding of virtue. Its fuller account, however, requires two further stages: the narrative unity of a human life and the context of a living tradition.
The diversity of virtue catalogues reveals not merely different lists of traits, but fundamentally different conceptions of what virtue is. For Homer, the virtuous hero excels in fulfilling his social role. For Aristotle, the Athenian gentleman exemplifies virtue in his pursuit of eudaimonia. The Christian, on the other hand, likens virtue to divine qualities (“fruits of the Spirit”) while advancing the Kingdom of God. For Benjamin Franklin, embodying the spirit of the Enlightenment, virtue is a pragmatic instrument to gain worldly success. And, Jane Austen, the Aristotle-inspired Christian, portrayed virtue in the faithful English gentleman. Each of these accounts claims more than personal preference. They imply genuine moral theories asserting universal and institutional authority. Yet they differ sharply in their presuppositions. For instance, Franklin’s virtue obtains through an extrinsic teleology, whereas a Christian virtue has an internal means-to-end relation. The question of a unified core concept, therefore, remains live.
Virtue finds its primary expression in the arena of “practice”. Practice is a coherent, complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that activity are realized. It is sustained by institutions that impart its standard of excellence, has a legacy, and is oriented toward a distinctive good. Not every skilled activity qualifies as practice. Bricklaying is a technical skill, but Architecture is a practice. Every practice possesses a telos, a good it seeks, which may be external or internal. External goods, such as wealth, prestige, status, or accolades, are contingent, zero-sum, and can be acquired legitimately (through merit) or illegitimately (through cheating). Internal goods, by contrast, are intrinsic to the practice itself. Its achievement by a practitioner not only benefits herself, but also enriches the entire community. Virtue, echoing Aristotle’s definition, is an acquired human quality whose possession through exercising a practice enables one to achieve the Internal good.
Virtues such as justice, honesty, courage, humility, and respect are necessary because stable cooperation and openness to criticism are essential for realizing internal goods. In a vicious milieu, for instance, of perfidy or acrimony, these goods remain unattainable. Thus, the very nature of virtues as enablers of internal goods rules out emotivism and moral relativism. The second stage situates virtues within the narrative unity of a single human life. This prevents fragmentation arising from the competing demands of multiple practices. By viewing life as a unified story, virtues such as constancy and integrity become intelligible as they serve an overriding telos: the good life for human beings. This development culminates in the third stage: the moral tradition. Traditions supply the historical and social context necessary to sustain practices and individual narratives. Together, these three stages, practice, narrative unity, and tradition, elevate virtue beyond mere functionalism into a coherent moral framework.
Exploration
Reading MacIntyre inspired me to explore Aesthetics through Ethics. Art is a practice whose internal goods, excellences of form, meaning, and beauty, can only be sustained where virtues govern the practitioner community and a living tradition orders those virtues toward an overriding telos. Classical and medieval art was produced within precisely such a tradition, theistically grounded and ordered by the Platonic-Christian unity of beauty, truth, and goodness as objective transcendentals rooted in God. The virtues shaping that tradition were real, not arbitrary, and the art they produced is genuinely beautiful and moving because it participated in an objectively ordered reality beyond the artist's arbitrary expressions. Postmodern art, by contrast, operates within an atheistic tradition whose theoretical commitments explicitly dissolve standards of excellence, collapse the distinction between internal and external goods, and substitute criterionless self-expression for genuine practice. Having abandoned both Virtue and Telos, it produces what MacIntyre calls simulacra of excellence, and since beauty is an objective transcendental grounded in God, art systematically oriented away from that ground tends toward ugliness by metaphysical necessity.