Anglican moral theology today

Anglican moral theology is a genealogy, in MacIntyre’s use of this concept. It is a tradition that is handed on from one generation to another, practically and theoretically. Moral theology is part of the tradition of moral virtue, practiced by Christians, in local communities, families, and of course the church. What is distinctive in Anglicanism was that after 1580 there emerged an Anglican tradition of moral enquiry, which recognized the Protestant emphasis on scripture and a quite different role for the clergy, alongside a deep appreciation of the old, pre-Reformation tradition of moral theology. Today, the Anglican exemplary tradition also incorporates debates on sexuality, gender, and questions of identity. In social ethics, postcolonial voices show both the idolatry of political life and how our common life can be a locus of divine grace. Anglican moral theology is both very vibrant and deeply pluralist today.

The Challenge of Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry Within Leadership-As-Practice

Herein, I clarify my concern regarding Raelin’s Leadership-as-Practice (L-A-P) and argue that inconsistent moral philosophies undermine the veracity of leadership theory, especially more recent democratic, shared, collective, and practice oriented theories; that this problem seems to be proliferating in the social sciences, and that this is especially concerning in socio-psychologically oriented theories. I contend that the moral foundations of L-A-P remain philosophically disquieting, unless it is understood as excluding moral agents other than those of a genealogical tradition, and that such exclusionary consequences in practice may lead to moral disengagement, which might then lead to cognitive dissonance and even self-harm.

Moral Uncertainty

Very often, we’re uncertain about what we ought, morally, to do. We don’t know how to weigh the interests of animals against humans, or how strong our duties are to improve the lives of distant strangers, or how to think about the ethics of bringing new people into existence. But we still need to act. So how should we make decisions in the face of such uncertainty? Though economists and philosophers have extensively studied the issue of decision-making in the face of uncertainty about matters of fact, the question of decision-making given fundamental moral uncertainty has been neglected. In this book, philosophers William MacAskill, Krister Bykvist and Toby Ord try to fill this gap. They argue that there are distinctive norms that govern how one ought to make decisions given moral uncertainty. They then defend an information-sensitive account of how to make such decisions according to which the correct way to act in the face of moral uncertainty depends on whether the moral theories in which one has credence are merely ordinal, cardinal, or both cardinal and intertheoretically comparable. They tackle the problem of how to make intertheoretic comparisons, discussing several novel potential solutions. Finally, they discuss implications of their view for metaethics and practical ethics, and show how their account can shed light on the value of moral enquiry.

Verdade e Moralidade em Alasdair MacIntyre

O artigo discute a relação entre verdade e moralidade na ética das virtudes de Alasdair MacIntyre, apontando para a tensão entre o realismo metafísico-teológico pressuposto em sua virada tomista a partir de Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, e a matriz, a nosso ver, claramente hermenêutico-pragmática de seu modelo da racionalidade das tradições morais de pesquisa racional, explicitado anteriormente em Depois da Virtude e em Justiça de Quem? Qual Racionalidade?.

Una aproximación al narrativismo de Alasdair MacIntyre en “Ethics in the conflicts of modernity: an essay on desire, practical reasoning and narrative”

En el presente trabajo nos proponemos analizar la nueva aproximación al narrativismo que realiza Alasdair Macintyre en su último libro: Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity. An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning and Narrative (2016). En primer lugar, realizamos un recorrido histórico por las obras más significativas en las que MacIntyre desarrolla su visión del narrativismo en primera instancia: After Virtue. A Study in Moral Theory (1981), Whose Justice, Which Rationality? (1988) y Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. Enciclopaedia, Genealogy and Tradition (1990). En segundo lugar, intentamos explorar la reincidente problemática de la narratividad en la obra del 2016 para explicar cómo exhibe un agente neoaristotélico la racionalidad y cómo justifica sus juicios a través de una narrativa. Además exploramos por qué la narrativa cobra más protagonismo en esta obra que la noción de tradición y evidencia una mayor relación con el telos de la vida humana. También, señalamos una reafirmación de la posición macinteryana desde el aristotelismo frente a los ahora denominados expresivistas.

Alasdair Agonistes: MacIntyre and a New Discontent with Modernity

This paper is an examination of certain assumptions that, I hold, lie in the background of MacIntyre’s conception of the formation of the intellectual schema as found, most prominently, in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. A thorough examination of MacIntyre’s concept of the rational schema, I will show, reveals that the parsing he proposes to carry out on intellectual history is confronted with a problem that finds its analogue in the field of biological taxonomy. In order to carry out this project of determining where the seams lie in intellectual history one must first recognize that the parsing itself is a scheme-dependent undertaking. As such it is not unlike the necessarily somewhat arbitrary identification of species and genera in the biological realm. In other words, it should be recognized that intellectual history, like the morphology of the plant and animal kingdoms, is continuous, not discreet. An almost wholly unexamined assumption that stalks through Whose Justice? and Three Rival Versions is that there are something like intellectual natural kinds in the history of ideas. Indeed, the notion that there are “traditions” at all in the sense in which MacIntyre uses the term may be a highly conventional artefact of an Enlightenment-era view of intellectual progress. This leads me to conclude that MacIntyre has failed to observe that the view of traditions and schemes neatly succeeding one another, on which much of his critique is dependent, is itself a product of the perspective he calls “encyclopedia.” This, in turn, will make manifest why it is that almost all of MacIntyre’s examples of rational scheme-switching are from the natural sciences rather than the normative, a fact I will show is connected to a paradigm of linear progression that one tends to find in the exact sciences, but not in praxis.

Balancing small against large burdens

Common principles for resource allocation in health care can prioritise the alleviation of small health burdens over lifesaving treatment. I argue that there is some evidence that these principles are at odds with a sizable share of public opinion, which holds that saving a life should take priority over any number of cures for minor ailments. I propose two possible explanations for this opinion, one debunking and one vindicatory. I also outline how well-designed surveys and moral enquiry could help decide between them. Finally, I consider how priority-setting principles could be adjusted if the view that saving a life always trumps alleviating small burdens were vindicated.