71–78 of 78 posts
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What would you consider yourself now, spiritually, if not Catholic?
Eastern Orthodox Christian. After Virtue is not a specifically Roman Catholic work, even though MacIntyre started slowly agree with its Aristotelian ethical system, and I still recommend the book to anyone willing to put in the work to understand it.
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How can reason give us shared values across cultures? Why do you suppose your moral clarity was generated from your brain and not your gut?
That's what the field of philosophy is about. I think, for instance, utilitarianism makes a lot more sense than "follow whatever your birth community historically does."
MacIntyre wrote in response to the failures of utilitarianism and deontology, and certain responses to that, so you'd better have arguments for utilitarianism that top those he knew about.
You've also clearly misread him. His argument is that morality is inherently social and good morals necessarily dependent on a good society. To show how deeply connected morals and society are he opts for the use of descriptions of historical societies, because superstition and fantasy alone, like math or thought experiments, just aren't good enough for him. In this he agrees with Marx and disagrees with parts of the analytic tradition in philosophy.
Specifically in After Virtue he also uses such examples to show that the ethics of a society might carry little moral weight, and that some historical societies were better at understanding and teaching morals than his own, in particular the philosophical ethics of the Enlightenment, i.e. deontology and utilitarianism.
If you actually have an argument for why the napkin math morals and disregard of freedom at the center of utilitarianism would be the pinnacle of human ethics I'd really like to hear it.
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> […] all without appealing to an authoritarian source of control. Well that was partly what After Virtue was about: arguing it wasn't possible to have an objective moral system without the supernatural. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Virtue And he's not the only one to hold this view (many atheists do as well): * https://global.oup.com/academic/product/atheist-overreach-97... You're left with either Nietzsche…
Link dump at the ready. > And he's not the only one to hold this view (many atheists do as well): The author Christian Smith is apparently a Roman Catholic. What do you mean?
Links to three books which I've read recently (some owned, some library), and a link to an overview of the topic which they cover.
> The author Christian Smith is apparently a Roman Catholic. What do you mean?
Whether he is or not, the book in question has numerous footnotes to people / philosophers who are atheists.
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Link dump at the ready. > And he's not the only one to hold this view (many atheists do as well): The author Christian Smith is apparently a Roman Catholic. What do you mean?
> Link dump at the ready. Links to three books which I've read recently (some owned, some library), and a link to an overview of the topic which they cover. > The author Christian Smith is apparently a Roman Catholic. What do you mean? Whether he is or not, the book in question has numerous footnotes to people / philosophers who are atheists.
“Many atheists do” (they are in the footnotes of this book written by a Catholic). That’s misleading.
The MacIntyre piece I read first and got the most from is "Hegel on Faces and Skulls". It explains Hegel's critique of physiognomy and phrenology, which is about what we can and cannot learn about someone by looking at them. Said another way, the difference between expressions and physical traits. I think about it a lot whenever I see claims made about facial recognition systems, and in my day job working on motion c…
"I do not know whose heads are criminal, but I think I know whose are imbecile."