Alasdair MacIntyre - After Virtue.doc

After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntryre
Notes by Dr. Ronald C. Arnett

Introductory Comments

This work is a major contributor to the philosophical dialogue of the last decade. MacIntyre lays out the limits of ''emotivism'' and the heart of the ''moral crisis'' before us.

Preface

1. No longer able to appeal to moral criteria as some form of standard.
2. Limits of liberal individualism.

Chapter 1: A Disquieting Suggestion

1. The language of morality is in grave disorder. (2)
2. Modern radical takes for granted that the object of critique will always be present and have the energy to meet the demands of constant critique.
3. We do not have the luxury of despair.

Do not however suppose that the conclusion to be drawn will turn out to be one of despair. Angst is an intermittently fashionable emotion and the misreading of some existentialist texts has turned despair itself into a kind of psychological nostrum. But if we are indeed in as bad a state as I take us to be, pessimism too will turn out to be one more cultural luxury that we shall have to dispense with in order to survive in these hard times.(5)

Chapter 2: The Nature of the Moral Disagreement Today and the Claims of Emotivism

1. No rational way to secure agreement within the culture - moral agreement. (6)
2. In the midst of conceptual incommensurability.
3. Danger of unhistorical interpretation. (11)
4. Emotivism defined:
5. 1. ''Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character.'' (10-11)
   2. What I have suggested to be the case by and large about our own culture - that in moral argument the apparent assertion of principles functions as a mask for expressions of personal preference - is what emotivism takes to be universally the case. Moreover it does so on grounds which require no general historical and sociological investigation of human cultures. for what emotivism asserts is in central part that there are and can be no valid rational justification for any claims that objective and impersonal moral standards exist and hence that there are no such standards. (19)
   3. ''Emotivism thus rests upon a claim that every attempt, whether past or present, to provide a rational justification for an objective morality has in fact failed.'' (19)
6. Emotivism summary
7. 1. In the eighteenth century Hume embodied emotivist elements in the large and complex fabric of his total moral theory: but it is only in this century that emotivism has flourished as a theory on its own. And it did so as a response to a set of theories which flourished, especially in England, between 1903 and 1939. We ought therefore to ask whether emotivism as a theory may not have been both a response to and in the very first instance, an account of not, as its protagonists indeed supposed, moral language as such, but moral language in England in the years after 1903 as and when that language was interpreted in accordance with that body of theory to the refutation of which emotivism was primarily dedicated. The theory in question borrowed from the early nineteenth century the name of 'intuitionism' and its immediate progenitor was G.E. Moore. (14)
   2. Nonetheless when Nietzsche sought to indict the making of would-be objective moral judgements as the mask worn by the will-to-power of those too weak and slavish to assert themselves with archaic and aristocratic grandeur, and when Sartre tried to exhibit the bourgeois rationalist morality of the Third Republic as an exercise in bad faith by those who cannot tolerate the recognition of their own choices as the sole source of moral judgment, both conceded the substance of that for which emotivism contended. Both indeed saw themselves as by their analysis condemning conventional morality, while most English and American emotivists believed themselves to be doing no such thing. Both saw their own task as in part of that of founding a new morality, but in the writings of both it is at this point that their rhetoric - very different as each is from the other- becomes cloudy and opaque, and metaphorical assertion replaces argument. The Ubermensch and the Sartrian Existentialist-cum-Marxist belong in the pages of a philosophical bestiary rather than in serious discussion. both by contrast are at their philosophically most powerful and cogent in the negative part of their critiques.

The appearance of emotivism in this variety of philosophical guises suggests strongly that it is indeed in terms of a confrontation with emotivism that my own thesis must be defined. For one way of framing my contention that morality is not what it once was is just to say that to a large degree people now think, talk and act as if emotivism were true, no matter what their avowed theoretical standpoint may be. Emotivism has become embodied in our culture. But of course in saying this I am not merely contending that morality is not what it once was, but also and more importantly that what once was morality has to some large degree disappeared - and that this marks a degeneration, a grave cultural loss. I am therefore committed to two distinct but related tasks.

The first is that of identifying and describing the lost morality of the past and of evaluating its claims to objectivity and authority: this is a task partly historical and partly philosophical. The second is that of making good my claim about the specific character of the modern age. For I have suggested that we live in a specifically emotivist culture, and if this is so we ought presumably to discover that a wide variety of our concepts and modes of behavior - and not only our explicitly moral debates and judgments - presuppose the truth of emotivism, if not at the level of self-conscious theorizing, at least in everyday practice. But is this so? To this latter issue I turn immediately. (22)

Chapter 3: Emotivism: Social Content and Social Context

1. Every moral philosophy, including ''emotivism,'' presupposes a sociology.
2. Characters--''. . . masks worn by moral philosophers.'' (28) ''. . . embody moral beliefs, doctrines, and theories. . .'' (28)
3. Character defined:
   With what I have called characters it is quite otherwise; and the difference arises from the fact that the requirements of a character are imposed from the outside, from the way in which other regard and use characters to understand and to evaluate themselves. With other types of social roles the role may be adequately specified in terms of the institutions of whose structures it is a part and the relation to those institutions of the individuals who fill the roles. In the case of a character this is not enough. A character is an object of regard by the members of the culture generally or by some significant segment of them. He furnishes them with a cultural and moral ideal. Hense the demand is that in this type of case role and personality be fused. Social type and psychological type are require to coincide. The character morally legitimates a mode of social existence. (29)
4. Types of characters: Rich Aesthete, Manager, and Therapist (30)
5. Characters share the social roles that define a culture.
6. The emotivist self has no limits for what he or she may pass judgment upon. (32)
7. The emotivist self is criterialess and without a teleology. (33)

Chapter 4: The Predecessor Culture and the Enlightenment Project of Justifying Morality

1. Struggle between the commensurable and the incommensurable; a criterialess moment. (39)
2. Mistakes:
3. 1. Kant - universal criteria without passion
   2. Hume - based upon passions without reason
   3. Kierkegaard - notion of radical choice (to be ethical), but there is not clear connection to how this authority is sustained via reason.
4. In all cases the public nature of morality and it rational justification is not clear.

But before we can understand either the significance of the failure to provide a shared, public rational justification for morality or the explanation of why that significance was not appreciated either at the time or since, we shall have to arrive at a much less superficial understanding of why the project failed and what the character of that failure was. (50)

Chapter 5: Why the Enlightenment Project of Justifying Morality Had to Fail

1. Need for:
2. 1. ''Untutored human-nature-as-it-happens-to-be; human-nature-as-it-happens-to-be; human-nature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realized-its-telos.
   2. Summary: Thus all these writers share in the project of constructing valid arguments which will move from premises concerning human nature as they understand it to be to conclusions about the authority of moral rules and precepts. I want to argue that any project on this form was bound to fail, because of an ineradicable discrepancy between their shared conception of moral rules and precepts on the one hand what was shared - despite much larger divergence's - in their conception of human nature on the other . both conceptions have a history and their relationship can only be made intelligible in the light of that history.

Consider first the general form of the moral scheme which was the historical ancestor of both conceptions, the moral scheme which in a variety of diverse forms and with numerous rivals came fro long periods to dominate the European Middle Ages from the twelfth century onwards, a scheme which included both classical and theistic elements. Its basic structure is that which Aristotle analyzed in the Nichomachean Ethics. Within that teleological scheme there is a fundamental contrast between man-as-he-happens-to-be and man-as-he-should-be-if-he-realized-his-essential-nature. Ethics is the science which is to enable men to understand how they make the transition from the former state to the latter. Ethics therefore in this view presupposes some account of potentiality and act, some account of the essence of man as a rational animal and above all some account of the human telos. The precepts which enjoin the various virtues and prohibit the vices which are their counterparts instruct us how to move from potentiality to act, how to realize our true nature, and to reach our true end. To defy them will be to be frustrated and incomplete, to fail to achieve that good of rational happiness which it is peculiarly ours as a species to pursue. The desires and emotions which we possess are to be put in order and educated by the use of such precepts and by the cultivation of those habits of action which the study of ethics prescribes; reason instructs us both as to what our true end is and as to how to reach it. We thus have a threefold scheme in which human-nature-as-its-happens-to-be (human nature in its untutored state) is initially discrepant and discordant with the precepts of ethics and needs to be transformed by the instruction of practical reason and experience into human-nature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realized-its-telos. Each of the three elements of the scheme - the conception of untutored human nature, the conception of the precepts of rational ethics and the conception of human-nature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realized-its-telos - requires reference to the other two if its status and function are to be intelligible.

This scheme is complicated and added to, but not essentially altered, when it is placed within a framework of theistic beliefs, whether Christian, as with Aquinas, or Jewish with Maimonides, or Islamic with Ibn Roschd. The precepts of ethics now have to be understood not only as teleological injunctions, but also as expression of a divinely ordained law. The table of virtues and vices has to be amended and added to and a concept of sin is added to the Aristotelian concept of error. The law of God requires a new kind of respect and awe. The true end of man can no longer be completely achieved in this world, but only in another. Yet the threefold structure of untutored human-nature-as-it-happens-to-be, human-nature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realized-its-telos and the precepts of rational ethics as the means for the transition from one to the other remains central to the theistic understanding of evaluative thought and judgment. (52-53)

3. 3. Key is the loss of teleology.
4. 18th Century still presupposed a teleology of a morality of god calling the human to be better. (60)
5. The Enlightenment secularizes morality. (60)
6. The Enlightenment mistake was to think that ideas could have an independent life. (61)

Chapter 6: Some Consequences of the Failed Enlightenment Project

1. The loss of authority and teleology. (62)
2. Connection of utilitarianism to emotivism:
3. 1. Loss of 1.
   2. I take it then that both the utilitarianism of the middle and late nineteenth century and the analytical moral philosophy of the middle and late twentieth century are alike unsuccessful attempts to rescue the autonomous moral agent from the predicament in which the failure of the Enlightenment project of providing him with a secular, rational justification for his moral allegiances had left him. I have already characterized that predicament as one in which the price paid for liberation from what appeared to be the external authority of traditional morality was the loss of any authoritative content from the would-be moral utterances of the newly autonomous agent. (68)
4. Call for: rights, protest, unmasking (68)
5. Character of emotivism:
6. 1. Aesthete (despair of self-indulgence)
   2. Therapist (advance the fiction)
   3. Manager (neutral)
   4. Bureaucratic expert (efficiency) (73)

Chapter 7: 'Fact', Explanation and Expertise

1. Error of the Enlightenment to take such events out of tradition or context.
2. Fact as an aristocratic issue.

'Fact' is in modern culture a folk-concept with an aristocratic ancestry. When Lord chancellor Bacon as part of the propaganda for his astonishing and idiosyncratic amalgam of past Platonism and future empiricism enjoined his followers to abjure speculation and collect facts, he was immediately understood by such as John Aubrey to have identified facts as collectors' items, to be gathered in with the same kind of enthusiasm that at other times has informed the collection of Spode china or the numbers of railway engines. The other early members of the Royal Society recognized very clearly that, whatever Aubrey was doing, it was not natural science as the rest of them understood it; but they did not recognize that on the whole it was he rather than they who was being faithful to the letter of Bacon's inductivism. Aubrey's error was of course not only to suppose that the natural scientist is a kind of magpie; it was also to suppose that the observer can confront a fact face-to-face without any theoretical interpretation interposing itself. (79)

3. Re-enactment of an 18th century error.

In every case the rise of managerial expertise would have to be the same central theme, and such expertise, as we have already seen, has two sides to it: there is the aspiration to value neutrality and the claim to manipulative power. Both of these, we can now perceive, derive from the history of the way in which the realm of fact and the realm of value were distinguished by the philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Twentieth-century social life turns out in key part to be the concrete and dramatic re-enactment of eighteenth-century philosophy. (87)

Chapter 8: The Character of Generalization in the Social Sciences and their Lack of Predictive Power

1. Enlightenment - generalizations. Machiavelli - Fortuna (unpredictability)
2. Four sources of systemic unpredictability
3. 1. Radical conceptual innovation
   2. Unpredictability based upon not knowing the future events.
   3. Game theory forgets the difference between prospective and retrospective knowledge.
   4. Pure contingency (99)
4. Predictable events
5. 1. Scheduling
   2. Statistical regularities
6. Point of unpredictability
7. 1. We need to remain to some degree opaque and unpredictable, particularly when threatened by the predictive practices of others. The satisfaction of this need to at least some degree supplies another necessary condition for human life being meaningful in the ways that is and can be. It is necessary, if life is to be meaningful, for us to be able to engage in long-term projects, and this requires predictability; it is necessary, if life is to be meaningful, for us to be in possession of ourselves and not merely to be the creations of other people's projects, intentions and desires, and this requires unpredictability. We are thus involved in a world in which we are simultaneously trying to render the rest of society predictable and ourselves unpredictable, to devise generalizations which will capture the behavior of others and to cast our own behavior into forms which will elude the generalizations which others frame. If these are general features of social life, what will be the characteristics of the best possible available stock of generalizations about social life? (104)

Chapter 9: Neitzsche or Aristotle

1. Nietzsche is the moral philosopher of our age. (111) No system could give foundation; each must be a moral agent.
2. Aristotle saw the virtues as public and carried out in practice.

Chapter 10: The Virtues in Heroic Society

1. Narrative-Homer
2. A person is what he does.
3. arete (virtue)
4. Keys:
5. 1. Winning might be losing. (Heroic culture defines games differently).
   2. Emotivist and Modern Self: There is thus the sharpest of contrasts between the emotivist self of modernity and the self of the heroic age. The self of the heroic age lacks precisely that characteristic which we have already seen that some modern moral philosophers take to be an essential characteristic of human selfhood: the capacity to detach oneself from any particular standpoint or point of view, to step backwards, as it were, and view and judge that standpoint or point of view from the outside. In heroic society there is no 'outside' except that of the stranger. A man who tried to withdraw himself from his given position in heroic society would be engaged in the enterprise of trying to make himself disappear.

Identity in heroic society involves particularity and accountability. I am answerable for ding or failing to do what anyone who occupies my role owes to others and this accountability terminates only with death. I have until my death to do what I have to do. Moreover this accountability is particular. It is to, for and with specific individuals, members of the same local community, that I am accountable. The heroic self does not itself aspire to universality even although in retrospect we may recognize universal worth in the achievements of that self. (126)

3. 3. Aristocratic self assertion vs. Role: What Nietzsche portrays is aristocratic self-assertion; what home and the sagas show are forms of assertion proper to and required by a certain role. The self becomes what it is in heroic societies only through its role; it is a social creation, not an individual one. Hence when Nietzsche projects back on to the archaic past his own nineteenth-century individualism, he reveals that what looked like a historical enquiry was actually an inventivew literary construction. Nietzsche replaces the fictions of the Enlightenment individualism, of which he is so contemptuous, with a set of individualist fictions of his own. From this it does not follow that one could not be an undeceived Nietzschean; and the whole importance of being a Nietzschean does after all lie in the triumph of being finally undeceived, being, as Nietzsche put it, truthful at last. It is simply, one might be tempted to conclude, that any would-be true Nietzschean will after all have to go further than Nietzsche. But is this indeed all?

The contemporary Nietzschean by his rejection of his immediate cultural environment - as Nietzsche himself rejected Wilhelmine Germany - and by his discovery that that in the past which Nietzsche praised was fiction rather than fact is condemned to an existence which aspires to transcend all relationship to the past. But is such transcendence possible? We are, whether we acknowledge it or not, what the past has made us and we cannot eradicate from ourselves, even in America, those parts of ourselves which are formed by our relationship to each formative stage in our history. If this is so, then even heroic society is still inescapably a part of us all, and we are narrating a history that is peculiarly our own history when we recount its past in the formation of our moral culture. (129-130)

Chapter 11: The Virtues at Athens

1. Virtue was tied to the community.

Athenian particularity is distinguished from Homeric particularity. For Homeric man there could be no standard external to those embodied in the structures of his own community to which appeal could be made; for Athenian man, the matter is more complex. His understanding of the virtues does provide him with standards by which he can question the life of his own community and enquire whether this or that practice or policy is just. (133)

2. Four views of virtue: Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles, and Sophistics
3. 1. Each specific with a teleology
   2. Each narrative
   3. ''And this suggests a hypothesis: that generally to adopt a stance on the virtues will be to adopt a stance on the narrative character of human life. Why this might be so is easy to understand.'' (144)

Chapter 12: Aristotle's Account of the Virtues

1. Keys: telos, phronesis, for each virtue (two corresponding vices: excess and deficiency), polis, practical intelligence.
2. The virtues of a culture:
3. 1. The great Australian philosopher John Anderson urged us 'not to ask of a social institution ''What end or purpose does it serve?'' but rather, ''Of what conflicts is it the scene?'' (Passmore 1962, p. xxii). If Aristotle had asked this question both of the polis and of the individual agent, he would have had an additional resource for understanding the teleological character of both the virtues and the social forms which provide them with a context. For it was Anderson's insight - a Sophoclean insight - that it is through conflict and sometimes only through conflict that we learn what our ends and purpose are. (163-164)
   2. Interesting test

Chapter 13: Medieval Aspects and Occasions

1. Luther calls Aristotle the buffoon that misled the Church. (165)
2. Aquinas links Aristotle and Christianity.
3. Contribution of the Medieval Ages: When Maimonides encountered the question as to why God in the Torah had instituted so many holidays, he replied that it was because holidays provide opportunities for the making and growth of friendship and that Aristotle has pointed out that the virtue of friendship is the bond of human community. It is this linking of a biblical historical perspective with an Aristotelian one in the treatment of the virtues which is the unique achievement of the middle ages in Jewish and Islamic terms as well as in Christian. (180)

Chapter 14: The Nature of the Virtues

1. Incompatible virtues: Homer, Sophocles, Aristotle, the New Testament and medieval thinkers differ from each other in too many ways. They offer us different and incompatible lists of the virtues; they give a different rank order of importance to different virtues; and they have different and incompatible theories of the virtues. If we were to consider later Western writers on the virtues, the list of differences and incompatibilities would be enlarged still further; and if we extended our enquiry to Japaenese, say, or American Indian cultures, the differences would become greater still. It would be all too easy to conclude that there are a number of rival and alternative conceptions of the virtues, but, even within the tradition which I have been delineating, no single core conception. (181)
2. Way out of problem is practices
3. 1. Definition of a practice: the first is to point out that my argument will not in any way imply that virtues are only exercised in the course of what I am calling practices. the second is to warn that I shall be using the word 'practice' in a specially defined way which does not completely agree with current ordinary usage, including my own previous use of the word. What am I going to mean by it?

By a 'practice' I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partically definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellences, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. Tic-tac-toe is not an example of a practice in this sense, nor is throwing a football with skill; but the game of football is, and so is chess. Bricklaying is not a practice; architecture is. Planting turnips is not a practice; farming is. so are the enquiries of physics, chemistry and biology, and so is the work of the historian, and so are painting and music. In the ancient and medieval worlds the creation and sustaining of human communities - of households, cities, nations - is generally taken to be a practice in the sense which I have defined it. Thus the range of practices is wide: arts, sciences, games, politics in the Aristotelian sense, the making and sustaining of family life, all fall under the concept. But the question of the precise range of practices is not at this stage of the first importance. Instead let me explain some of the key terms involved in my definition, beginning with the notion of goods internal to a practice. (187-188)

2. 2. A practice involves standards of excellence and obedience to rules as well as the achievement of goods. To enter into a practice is to accept the authority of those standards and the inadequacy of my own performance as judged by them. It is to subjecty my own attitudes, choices, preferences and tastes to the standards which currently and partically define the practice. Practices of course, as I have just noticed, have a history: games, sciences and arts all have histories. Thus the standards are not themselves immune from criticism, but nonetheless we cannot be initiated into a practice without accepting the authority of the best standards realized so far. If, on starting to listen to music, I do not accept my own incapacity to judge correctly, I will never learn to hear, let alone to appreciate Bartok's last quartets. If, on starting to play baseball, I do not accept that others know better than I when to throw a fastball and when not, I will never learn to appreciate good pitching let alone to pitch. In the realm of practices the authority of both goods and standards operates in such a way as to rule out all subjectivist and emotivist analyses of judgment. De gustibus est disputandum.

We are now in a position to notice an important difference between what I have called internal and what I have called external goods. It is characteristic of what I have called external goods that when achieved they are always some individual's property and possession. Moreover characteristically they are such that the more someone has of them, the less there is for other people. This is sometimes the case by reason of contingent circumstance as with money. External goods are therefore characteristically objects of competition in which there must be losers as well as winners. Internal goods are indeed the outcome of competition to excel, but it is characteristic of them that their achievement is a good for the whole community who participate in the practice. So when Turner transformed the seascape in painting or W.G. Grace advanced the art of batting in cricket in a quite new way their achievement enriched the whole relevant community.

But what does all or any of this have to do with the concept of the virtues? It turns out that we are not in a position to formulate a first, even if partial and tentative definition of a virtue. A virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods. Later this definition will need amplification and amendment. But as a first approximation to an adequate definition it already illuminates the place of the virtues in human life. For it is not difficult to show for a whole range of key virtues that without them the good internal to practices are barred to us, but not just barred to us generally, barred in a very particular way.

It belongs to the concept of a practice as I have outline it - and as we are all familiar with it already in our actual lives, whether we are painters or physicists or quarterbacks or indeed just lovers of good painting or first-rate experiments or a well-thrown pass - that its goods can only be achieved by subordinating ourselves within the practice in our relationship to other practitioners. We have to learn to recognize what is due to whom; we have to be prepared to take whatever self-endangering risks are demanded along the way; and we have to listen carefully to what we are told about our own inadequacies and to reply with the same carefulness for the facts. In other words we have to accept as necessary components of any practice with internal goods and standards of excellence the virtues of justice, courage and honesty. For not to accept these, to be willing to cheat as our imagined child was willing to chat in his or her early days at chess, so are bars us from achieving the standards of excellence or the good internal to the practice that it renders the practice pointless except as a device for achieving external goods.

We can put the same point in another way. Every practice requires a certain kind of relationship between those who participate in it. Now the virtues are those goods by reference to which, whether we like it or not, we define our relationships to those other people with whom we share the kinds of purposes and standards which inform practices. Consider an example of how reference to the virtues has to be made in certain kinds of human relationship. (190-191)

3. 3. Internal and external practices, community, public, not in theory (action)
4. Still need a teleology.

Chapter 15: The Virtues, the Unity of a Human Life and the Concept of a Tradition

1. Self separated from roles cannot be the bearer of virtues.

''It is perhaps therefore unsurprising to realize that the self as thus conceived cannot be envisaged as a bearer of the Aristotelian virtues.'' (205)

2. Narrative: teleological and unpredictable

Thus the narratives which we live out have both an unpredictable and a partially teleological character. If the narrative of our individual and social lives is to continue intelligibly - and either type of narrative may lapse into unintelligibility - it is always both the case that there are constraints on how the story can continue and that within those constraints there are indefinitely many ways that it can continue.

A central thesis then begins to emerge: man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially, a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; I can only answer the question 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?' We enter human society, that is, with one or more inputted characters - roles into which we have been drafted - and we have to learn what they are in order to be able to understand how others respond to us and how our responses to them are apt to be construed. It is through hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kings, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest so9ns who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living and go into exile to live with the swine, that children learn or mis-learn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are. Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their society, including out own, except through the stock of stories which constitute its initial dramatic resources. Mythology, it its original sense, is at the heart of things. Vico was right and so was Joyce. And so too of course is that moral tradition from heroic society to its medieval heirs according to which the telling of stories has a key part in educating us into the virtues.

I suggested earlier that 'an' action is always an episode in a possible history . . . (216)

3. Selfhood is tied to role in narrative.
4. Narrative as a live tradition

A living tradition then is a historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition. Within a tradition the pursuit of goods extends through generations, sometimes through many generations. Hence the individual's search for his or her good is generally and characteristically conducted within a context defined by those traditions of which the individual's life is a part and this is true both of those goods which are internal to practices and of the goods of a single life. Once again the narrative phenomenon of embedding is crucial: the history of a practice in our time is generally and characteristically embedded in and made intelligible in terms of the larger and longer history of the tradition through which the practice in its present form was conveyed to us; the history of each of our own lives is generally and characteristically embedded in and made intelligible in terms of the larger and longer histories of a number of traditions. I have to say 'generally and characteristically' rather than 'always', for traditions decay, disintegrate and disappear. What then sustains and strengthens traditions? What weakens and destroys them? (222)

Chapter 16: From the Virtues to Virtue to After Virtue