For Work / Against Work
Debates on the centrality of work

Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2

by MacIntyre, Alasdair (2006)

Abstract

Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the most creative and important philosophers working today. This volume presents a selection of his classic essays on ethics and politics collected together for the first time, focussing particularly on the themes of moral disagreement, moral dilemmas, and truthfulness and its importance. The essays range widely in scope, from Aristotle and Aquinas and what we need to learn from them, to our contemporary economic and social structures and the threat which they pose to the realization of the forms of ethical life. They will appeal to a wide range of readers across philosophy and especially in moral philosophy, political philosophy, and theology.

Key Passage

Aristotle himself considers in various places the goods peculiar to a wide range of occupations: those of the soldier, the athlete, the philosopher, the tragic or comic poet, the holder of political office, and the musician, but he notoriously excludes from citizenship and therefore from full moral education both those whose labor is manual and women, and in so doing he also excludes from view – and in so doing exhibits his own errors and self-deceptions – the goods to be achieved by farming and other forms of manual labor and the goods of those household activities, including the upbringing of small children, which he understands as proper occupations only for women. (p.34)

Keywords

Macintyre, Aristotle, Aquinas, Telos, Marxism, Moral Disagreement, Moral Philosophy, Ethics, Free Markets, Enlightenment

Themes

Ethics and Politics, 2 Vols

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