After Virtue

After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory is one of the most influential works of twentieth-century moral philosophy. Its central argument has two movements. The first diagnoses the incoherence of modern moral discourse: we continue to use moral vocabulary inherited from Aristotelian and Christian traditions, but we have abandoned the metaphysical and teleological framework within which that vocabulary had determinate meaning. The result is emotivism — the dominant modern doctrine that all evaluative judgments are expressions of preference — and the interminable debates that emotivism produces, debates in which participants cannot reach agreement because they are using rival and incommensurable moral vocabularies. The second movement proposes a recovery of the Aristotelian tradition, elaborated through the concepts of practices, internal goods, virtues, narrative unity, and tradition.