Incoming Links

• March 1st, 2021

  As described in 📙 After Virtue, Virtue Ethics has a Vertical axis centered around Flourishing and the Common Good. Life may be a kind of playground, but it has structure and directionality.

• March 3rd, 2021

  The domain of Ashcroft's archeology is something like the social graph of collaboration and communication. It's teleological because there is a positive direction to the disclosing. The structure we're looking for is something like the Good for ourselves as part of a Common Good, or in a word, Eudaimonia.

  Perry's essay anticipates a charge of selfish hedonism by showing one's own pursuit of sustainable pleasure to be a core practice of the Common Good. If you neglect your own body's pleasure, you've checked out of the common pursuit of well-being:

• 📙 Learning From MacIntyre

  MacIntyre thinks that in contemporary life people tend to lead “double lives,” of which they may be more or less aware. On the one hand, we participate in social institutions of state, market and constricted and punitive structures of blame, shame and responsibility that he calls Morality—and there is pressure for us to understand ourselves in these terms. On the other hand, we are initiated into practices associated with being in a Family or community, or a skill that allows us to identify Common Goods in which we want to contribute, as well as excellences that are Internal to the practices.

• 📙 Reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue

  From the standpoint of civil society, there is no Common Good in the traditional sense of the term. From the standpoint of civil society, the good of any individual is only one small element of the aggregate collective good of society.

  From what we may call “the standpoint of the Common Good,” the standpoint of Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas, the Common Good is not an aggregation of private interests, and it is not a formal or procedural good like justice or the right to due process. From this ancient and medieval standpoint, the Common Good is a substantive good that we can seek for ourselves only through participation in the life of the communities to which we belong; it is a good for each of us that we can all share, but only if we seek it together. This ancient and medieval standpoint of the Common Good views the human person as a political animal who belongs to a community neither by Choice nor by accident, but by Nature.

  Lacking any Common Good in the older sense of the term, modern moral and political philosophy places a sharp distinction between egoistic and altruistic actions.

  Every human act worthy of the name is pursued for an end, and sound practical rules are nothing but wise counsels, directing the complex web of human actions toward the Common Good. But when the Common Good is no longer understood, the rules survive only as social habits, as material survivals of a culture that is formally lost.

  Without the “background concepts” of Teleology and the Common Good that make it intellectually coherent, the tradition of the virtues became an empty shell in the dominant culture of Modernity. Yet, the language of virtue has remained a central part of the Western moral vocabulary, and this has led to several redefinitions of virtue over the past few centuries.

  Where the tradition had defined the virtues as habits of transformed desire that enable people to seek the Common Good, Modernity sees the virtues either as good natural desires or as dispositions to serve the public good against one’s own desires.