Sadler's Lectures Alasdair MacIntyre - How To Appear Virtuous Without Being So - Inadequate Shared Public Morality
Jan 8, 2024
Alasdair MacIntyre, 20th and 21st century philosopher and moral theorist discusses the inadequacy of shared public morality and virtues. He highlights the lack of coherent understanding of virtues and the reliance on superficial moral rhetoric. The podcast explores moral dilemmas in military and commercial scenarios, emphasizing the limitations of indeterminate conceptions of virtue.
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Rhetoric Replaces Real Shared Morality
- Late-modern culture offers a shared moral rhetoric, not a substantive shared public morality.
- That rhetoric uses virtue-words without agreed definitions, leaving moral education shallow.
Shared Minimum Is Indeterminate
- A truly shared public morality would be determinate and provide systematic accounts of virtues.
- The commonplace shared minimum only says what should be upheld publicly and remains indeterminate beyond that.
Political Morality Can Be Counterfeit
- Even robustly articulated political moralities can be counterfeit when practitioners fail to embody virtues.
- Public claims of courage or integrity often collapse under real pressure or hypocrisy.