Whose Justice, Which Rationality - Alasdair MacIntyre ( In-Depth Book Summary) - “Preface”
This is the beginning of an in-depth summary of this book. My objective is to avoid being overly technical and make clearer what incredible thinkers, such as this one, have communicated through their books.
All the quotes or pages are from the following edition:
Alasdair MacIntyre: Whose justice? Which rationality?, London: Duckworth, 2001.
The purpose of the book
This book should be considered a sequel of his previous book published in 1981, After Virtue.
In that book McIntyre set out to show 2 things:
How the way we use “evaluative concepts” or “moral concepts” lack the means to help us arrive at a position with respect to rival moral options (for example, liberal individualism versus socialism; pro life versus pro-choice).
How the ethical framework of Aristotle’s ethics is a way out, mainly because in his philosophy we find a the concept of telos or end of life, as one key feature of the Good Life.
This book, in contrast, has the objective of stating clearly “what makes it rational to act in one way rather than another” AND “what makes it rational to advance and defend one conception of practical rationality rather than another”.
As it can bee seen, for MacIntyre both things are interconnected. He realized this when he was teaching on “justice”. He saw clearly how different conceptions of justice are dependent on beliefs or presuppositions about what “practical rationality” means. By this term, he is thinking of the we think and argue about ethical issues, hence the name “practical rationality”.
QUICK WARNING
McIntyre mentions that this book, Whose justice…., can be read on its own. It is not necessary to read After Virtue. I, as a philosophy PhD student, must say that the previous book can be very difficult if one has not mastered certain aspects of the philosophical tradition.
