Narrative Unity of a Human Life

In chapter 15 of After Virtue, MacIntyre argues that the self is neither a Humean bundle of experiences nor a Sartrean radical chooser but a character in an ongoing narrative. The meaning of any particular action is derived from its place in the larger story — the narrative that connects the past from which the self has come to the future toward which the self is moving. This account has direct implications for the AI moment: when AI disrupts a practice, it disrupts the narratives within which practitioners have understood their lives. The senior engineer who realizes that implementation work can be performed by a machine faces not merely a professional challenge but an existential one — a crisis in the narrative within which his life has been intelligible.