How to Think About Thinking

Assignment: Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, Prologue and Chapter 1

In the prologue and first chapter of After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre asks us to imagine a dystopian future in which science has been destroyed and then partly reconstructed from scattered fragments. People still use scientific words and formulas, but they no longer understand the deeper theories that once made those words meaningful. MacIntyre says that modern moral argument is often like that. We still use moral language—words like rights, justice, freedom, duty, fairness, and harm—but we often use them without agreeing on the larger moral framework that gives them meaning. That is one reason our disagreements can feel so frustrating. We are not just disagreeing about conclusions; we are often using different starting points, different assumptions, and different ideas about what counts as a good argument.

This matters for our course because Learning to Disagree is not only about becoming more polite or more open-minded, though those things matter. It is also about learning how to notice the deeper patterns in our own thinking and in the thinking of others. MacIntyre helps us ask: Where did this argument come from? What kind of moral world does it assume? What does this person think human beings are for? What goods are they trying to protect? His larger project is to show that serious moral reasoning does not happen in a vacuum. It is shaped by traditions, communities, practices, habits, and stories about what makes a life good. For our purposes, MacIntyre gives us a way to see disagreement not simply as a battle between opinions, but as an opportunity to understand the deeper frameworks that shape how people think, argue, and live.