Ethics, Markets, and MacIntyre
Abstract
MacIntyre’s theory of practices, institutions, and their respective kinds of goods, has revived and enriched the ethical critique of market economies, and his view of politics as centrally concerned with common goods and human flourishing presents a major challenge to neutralist liberal theorists’ attempts to exclude distinctively ethical considerations from political deliberation. However, the rejection of neutrality does not entail the rejection of liberalism tout court: questions of human flourishing may be accorded a legitimate role in political decisions-including those about economic systems - provided that the powers of the state remain subject to certain recognizably liberal constraints. Further, although neutralist liberals often defend market economies on the mistaken grounds that they alone are consistent with the principle of ethical neutrality, a non-neutralist defence of them should not be ruled out, especially if the substantive theory of goods used to evaluate them is somewhat less restrictive than MacIntyre’s.
© 2008 by Lucius & Lucius, Stuttgart
Articles in the same Issue
- MacIntyre and the Polis
- Men at Work: Poesis, Politics and Labor in Aristotle and Some Aristotelians
- After Tradition?: Heidegger or MacIntyre, Aristotle and Marx
- The Uniqueness of After Virtue (or ‘Against Hindsight’)
- MacIntyre, Thomism and the Contemporary Common Good
- From Voluntarist Nominalism to Rationalism to Chaos: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Critique of Modern Ethics
- MacIntyre’s Search for a Defensible Aristotelian Ethics and the Role of Metaphysics
- MacIntyre’s Radical Intellectualism: The Philosopher as a Moral Ideal
- Traditional Moral Knowledge and Experience of the World
- Moral Philosophy, Moral Identity and Moral Cacophony: On MacIntyre on the Modern Self
- Utopias and the Art of the Possible
- Misunderstanding MacIntyre on Human Rights
- Alasdair MacIntyre’s Contribution to Marxism: A Road not Taken
- Why Business Cannot Be a Practice
- Ethics, Markets, and MacIntyre
- What More Needs to Be Said? A Beginning, Although Only a Beginning, at Saying It
- Social Criticism and the Exclusion of Ethics
- Practices: The Aristotelian Concept
Articles in the same Issue
- MacIntyre and the Polis
- Men at Work: Poesis, Politics and Labor in Aristotle and Some Aristotelians
- After Tradition?: Heidegger or MacIntyre, Aristotle and Marx
- The Uniqueness of After Virtue (or ‘Against Hindsight’)
- MacIntyre, Thomism and the Contemporary Common Good
- From Voluntarist Nominalism to Rationalism to Chaos: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Critique of Modern Ethics
- MacIntyre’s Search for a Defensible Aristotelian Ethics and the Role of Metaphysics
- MacIntyre’s Radical Intellectualism: The Philosopher as a Moral Ideal
- Traditional Moral Knowledge and Experience of the World
- Moral Philosophy, Moral Identity and Moral Cacophony: On MacIntyre on the Modern Self
- Utopias and the Art of the Possible
- Misunderstanding MacIntyre on Human Rights
- Alasdair MacIntyre’s Contribution to Marxism: A Road not Taken
- Why Business Cannot Be a Practice
- Ethics, Markets, and MacIntyre
- What More Needs to Be Said? A Beginning, Although Only a Beginning, at Saying It
- Social Criticism and the Exclusion of Ethics
- Practices: The Aristotelian Concept
