CONCEPT
Narrative Unity of a Human Life
MacIntyre's thesis that a human life is intelligible as the unity of a narrative quest — the story within which actions acquire moral meaning by their place in a life pursuing particular goods.
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.
In The You On AI Field Guide
MacIntyre's narrative account is developed against two rivals. The Humean view holds that the self is