Alasdaira Maclntyre’a krytyka etyki nowożytnej i współczesnej

Abstract

The article reconstructs Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of modem and contemporary philosophy of morality. This critique, through its confrontation of various modem propositions of the theoiy of morality, reveals that the ethics of autonomous subjects whether in liberalism or in emotivism does not have as its foundations rational explanations of moral conduct, thus leaving us to our irrational impulses of will and emotion. A critical confrontation between modem and ancient ethics discloses why a modem project of moral theory failed. Having taken only fragments of teleological ethics of Aristotle or Aquinas, one could not reach rationality; that’s why, modernity created idiolects understood only within those fragments. When one does not have any rationality, one should draw from the rationality of Aristotle and Aquinas and develop it creatively. The rationality of such an ethics emphasises a necessity of the theory of virtue in philosophy and practice of morality. Omitting this essential element from modem and contemporary philosophy of morality makes ethics be formulated as a theory of egoism and, opposite to it, theory of conventional laws. In the social field this is realised as techniques manipulating others by a therapist and manager-expert of effectiveness.