References for Theme: Ethics and Politics, 2 Vols
- MacIntyre, Alasdair
- Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (2006)
(p.146) For the same reasons we ought also to honour those Christian laity and clergy, a very small minority, who recognized relatively early the systematic injustices generated by nascent and developed commercial and industrial capitalism. Those evils were and are of two kinds. There is on the one hand the large range of particular injustices perpetrated against individuals and groups on this or that particular occasion, where those other individuals who committed the injustices could have done otherwise consistently with conformity to the standards of profit and loss, of commercial and industrial success and failure, enforced by and in a capitalist...
- Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (2006)
(p.147) The relationships which result are the impersonal relationships imposed by capitalist markets upon all those who participate in them. What is necessarily absent in such markets is any justice of desert. Concepts of a just wage and a just price necessarily have no application to transactions within those markets. Hard, skilled, and conscientious work, if it does not generate sufficient profit, something that it is not in the power of the worker to determine, will always be apt to be rewarded by unemployment. It becomes impossible for workers to understand their work as a contribution to the common good of...
- Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (2006)
(p.148) Contractual relationships imposed by duress are not genuinely contractual. So freedom to accept or reject particular terms of employment and freedom to accept or reject particular terms of exchange in free markets are crucial elements in those markets being in fact free...And in a society of small productive units, in which everyone has an opportunity to own (and not indirectly through shareholdings) the means of production – the type of economy envisaged by Chesterton and other distributists – free markets will be a necessary counterpart to freedom of ownership and freedom of labor.
- Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (2006)
(p.156) The modes of social practice in some relatively small-scale and local communities – examples range from some kinds of ancient city and some kinds of medieval commune to some kinds of modern cooperative farming and fishing enterprises – in which social relationships are informed by a shared allegiance to the goods internal to communal practices, so that the uses of power and wealth are subordinated to the achievement of those goods, make possible a form of life in which participants pursue their own goods rationally and critically, rather than having continually to struggle, with greater or lesser success, against being...
- Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (2006)
(p.181) Within what kinds of institutional structure have the moral and political concepts and theories of the Enlightenment been at home? Within what types of discourse in what types of social context have they been able to find effective expression? A salient fact is that for some considerable time now in postEnlightenment culture moral and political concepts and theories have led a double life, functioning in two distinct and very different ways. They are afforded one kind of expression and exposed to one kind of attention in the contexts of academic life, in university and college teaching and enquiry, and in...
- Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (2006)
(p.182) One peculiar set of features of distinctively modern social structures will bring out one aspect of this use of power. It is that compartmentalization of social life as a result of which each sphere has its own set of established norms and values as a counterpart to the specialization of its tasks and the professionalization of its occupations.
- Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (2006)
(p.184) These and similar facts support a crucial generalization: that the dominant culture of postEnlightenment modernity lacks any overall agreement, let alone any rationally founded or even rationally debatable agreement, on what it is that would make it rational for an individual to sacrifice her or is life for some other or others or what it is that would make it rational to allow an individual’s life to be sacrificed for the sake of some other individual or some group or institution. But this does not mean that within that culture there is no way of arriving at practically effective agreements...
- Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (2006)
(p.185) The failure of those modern institutions that have been the embodiment of the best social and political hopes of the Enlightenment is quite as striking. And those institutions fail by Enlightenment standards. For they do not provide – in fact they render impossible – the kinds of institutionalized reading, talking and arguing public necessary for effective practical rational thought about just those principles and decisions involved in answering such questions as: “How is a human life to be valued?” or “What does accountability in our social relationships require of us?” or “Whom, if anyone, may I legitimately deceive?” – questions...
- Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (2006)
(p.191) We are always liable to error in making particular moral judgments, sometimes intellectual errors such as going beyond the evidence or relying upon some unsubstantiated generalization, sometimes moral errors such as being over-influenced by our liking and disliking of particular individuals or projecting on to a situation some unrecognized phantasy or exhibiting either insensitivity to or sentimentality about suffering. And our intellectual errors are often rooted in moral errors. We need therefore to have tested our capacity for moral deliberation and judgment in this and that type of situation by subjecting our arguments and judgments systematically to the critical scrutiny...
- Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (2006)
(p.192) Accountability to particular others, participation in critical practical enquiry, and acknowledgment of the individuality both of others and of oneself are all then marks of the social relationships and mode of self-understanding that characterize the moral agent. Strip away those social relationships and that mode of self-understanding and what would be left would be a seriously diminished type of agency, one unable to transcend the limitations imposed by its own social and cultural order. Moral agency thus does seem to require a particular kind of social setting. There must therefore be a place in any social order in which the...
- Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (2006)
(p.193) The thinking that is needed is practical thinking, thinking that may occasionally be driven to extend its resources by opening up theoretical questions, but even then always for the sake of practice. The milieus in which such thinking is at home are, as I have already said, those of everyday practice, of the everyday life of certain kinds of family and household, of certain kinds of workplace, of certain kinds of school and church, and of a variety of kinds of local community. And what their flourishing will always be apt to generate is tension, tension that may develop into...
- Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (2006)
(p.196) ...the powers of moral agency can only be exercised by those who are able to justify rational confidence in their judgments about the goodness and badness of human beings and this ability requires participation in social relationships and in types of activity in which one’s reflective judgments emerge from systematic dialogue with others and are subject to critical scrutiny by others. Without milieus within which such relationships and activities are effectively sustained the possibility of the exercise of the powers of moral agency will be undermined. Those who participate in the relationships and activities of such milieus will always find...
- Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (2006)
(p.197) ...the powers of moral agency can only be exercised by those who are able to justify rational confidence in their judgments about the goodness and badness of human beings and this ability requires participation in social relationships and in types of activity in which one’s reflective judgments emerge from systematic dialogue with others and are subject to critical scrutiny by others. Without milieus within which such relationships and activities are effectively sustained the possibility of the exercise of the powers of moral agency will be undermined. Those who participate in the relationships and activities of such milieus will always find...
- Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (2006)
(p.199) ...if in a policy meeting of the Midwestern power executives one of them had proposed attempting to bring about an overall reduction in power consumption, or if at a social gathering someone were to insist that the standards of truthfulness required in scientific reports should also apply to party gossip, their remarks might be treated as a joke or ignored, but, if such a speaker persisted, they would find themselves deprived at least temporarily of their status in that sphere of activity, treated, that is, as a source of embarrassing background noise rather than a participant. And the effects of...
- Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (2006)
(p.28) Phronesis is the virtue of those who know how to do what is good, indeed what is best, in particular situations and who are disposed by their character traits to do it. To do what it is good and best to do in a particular situation is to act kata ton orthon logon; it is to judge and to feel and to act in accordance with the mean of virtue and that mean is determined by right reason.How then do we employ right reasoning in doing what is best? There is no set of rules to invoke, nothing therefore that corresponds...
- Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (2006)
(p.34) 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...
- Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (2006)
(p.35) What philosophical enquiry achieves, on the view that I am ascribing to Aristotle, is an outline sketch of what it would be for any rational animal to achieve its specific good, constructing by dialectical argument an account of what eudaimonia cannot consist in, that is, in such lives as the life of moneymaking, the life of sensual pleasure, or the life for which political honor is a sufficient end, and what it must be, a life of activities that give expression to the several moral and intellectual virtues, a life of friendships and of engagement in political activity, a life...
- Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (2006)
(p.39) [What kind of practice is it to which Aristotelian moral and political theory is counterpart?]First, because the practice of an Aristotelian community must be one informed by shared deliberation, it must be a type of practice in which there is sufficient agreement about goods and about their rank ordering to provide shared standards for rational deliberation on both moral and political questions. This is of course compatible with the occurrence of extended and significant disagreements, but it still requires a type of community that exhibits a common mind in its practice arising from its shared goals. By contrast the societies...
- Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (2006)
(p.64) The first principles, the fundamental precepts, of the natural law, on Aquinas’s view, all give expression to the first principle of practical reason: that good is to be done and pursued and evil is to avoided. The goods that we as human beings have it in us to pursue are of three kinds: the good of our physical nature, the good, that is, of preserving our lives and health from those dangers that threaten our continuing existence; the goods that belong to our animal nature, including the good of sexuality and the goods of educating and caring for our children;...
- Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (2006)
(p.70) We distinguish, that is, between what it is good to do or to achieve and what we currently happen to want and our reasons for action, if they are good reasons, always involve implicit, if not explicit reference to some good or goods that can be achieved by acting in this particular way rather than in that. This distinction between goods and objects of desire is one that is primarily embodied in our everyday practice, including our practical discourse, and only secondarily in our theoretical reflections about our practice. And it is also at the level of everyday practice that...
- Ethics and Politics: Selected Essays, Volume 2 (2006)
- The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays, Volume 1 (2006)
(p.156) The telos/finis of any type of systematic activity is, on an Aristotelian and Thomistic view, that end internal to activity of that specific kind, for the sake of which and in the direction of which activity of that kind is carried forward. Many types of activity, of course, are intelligible as human activities only because and insofar as they are embedded in some other type of activity, and some types of such activity may be embedded in any one of a number of other types of intelligible activity. So it is, for example, with tree-felling, which may as an activity...
- The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays, Volume 1 (2006)
(p.194) To understand oneself as having such a determinate and shared nature and correspondingly a well-defined place in the order of things is, on a Thomistic view, to understand oneself as a part of more than one whole, constituted as what one is not only by the relation of oneself as individual human being to one’s household and family, and to the good of that household and family, and of oneself and one’s family to the local political community, and to the good of that community, and of oneself, one’s family, and one’s political community to the whole natural order and...
- The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays, Volume 1 (2006)
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