The most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements; and the most striking feature of the debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable character. (查看原文)
I can only answer the question 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior
question 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?'
如果我能够回答先在的“在哪个或哪些故事里我们发现自己是其中的一分子？”的问题，那么我只能回答“我要做什么？”的问题。 (查看原文)
the second crucial fact is easy to see retrospectively: the first part of what Moore says is plainly false and the second and third parts are at the very least highly contentious. Moore's argument at times are, it must seem now, obviously defective--he tries to show that 'good' is indefinable, for example, by relying on a bad dictionary definition of 'definition'--and great deal is asserted rather than argued. and yet it is this to us plainly false, badly argued position which Keynes treated as 'the beginning of a renaissance', which Lytton Strachey declared to have 'shattered all writers on ethics from Aristotle and Christ to Herbert Spencer and Mr. Bradley' and which Leonard Woolf described as 'substituting for the religious and philosophical nightmares, delusions, hallucinations in whic... (查看原文)
i take it then that both the utilitarianism of the middle and late nineteenth century and the analytical moral philosophy of the middle and late twentieth century are alike unsuccessful attempts to rescue the autonomous moral agent from the predicament in which the failure of the Enlightenment project of providing him with a secular, rational justification for his moral allegiances had left him. i have already characterized that predicament as one in which the price paid for liberation from what appeared to be the external authority of traditional morality was the loss of any authoritative content from the would-be moral utterances of the newly autonomous agent. each moral agent now spoke unconstrained by the externalities of divine law, natural teleology or hierarchical authority; but why... (查看原文)
this last is what happened to Kafka's character K. in both <The Trial> and <The Castle>. (It is no accident that Kafka could not end his novels, for the notions of an ending like that of a beginning has its sense only in terms of intelligible narrative.) (查看原文)
A central thesis then begins to emerge: man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship: I can only answer the question 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?' We enter human society, that is, with one or more imputed characters - roles into which we have been drafted - and we have to learn what they are in order to be able to understand how others respond to us and how our responses to them are apt to be construed. It is through hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kings, wolv... (查看原文)
作者: Alasdair MacIntyre 副标题: A Study in Moral Theory, Third Edition isbn: 0268035040 书名: After Virtue 页数: 312 定价: USD 26.00 出版社: University of Notre Dame Press 出版年: 2007-3-1 装帧: Paperback
