This thesis thus runs contrarian to this development, an attempt to pull together a variety of existing philosophical traditions. The concurrent loss of independent philosophy departments, their subsumption under other disciplines or even complete disappearance from many major universities globally, has resulted in a significant neglect of investment in alternative approaches in tentative investigations from the tradition of the Liberal Arts as opposed to the Servile Arts. This is a practice made worse by the dominance of theories and proposals that align most with the concerns and sensibilities of businessmen and politicians for example in contexts such as contemporary Dutch society, with its public-private partnership systems that guarantee inbuilt short-sightedness. Fixated on the here and now, they fail to properly consider the requirements of the assessment and management of fundamental, future, and potential risks of today’s technological world.
The assessment and management of risks of technological and scientific innovation has been largely dominated by a series of approaches that concentrate almost exclusively on the problems at hand, almost never on the people who have to handle, or are the cause of, said problems. I believe MacIntyre has philosophically overstated the conflict between Aristotle and liberal modernity. Finally, MacIntyre’s own epistemic arguments commit him to an ethical pluralism that poses a practical problem for his anti-liberalism. Next I trace MacIntyre’s revolutionary negation of liberalism to non-Aristotelian sources in the British New Left and its strain of Marxism. There is no necessary link between liberalism and emotivism.
In the first part I argue against MacIntyre’s assumption that liberal orders are by their very nature unable to foster Aristotelian virtues because they are hopelessly tied to an “emotivist” notion of self. In this paper I argue that MacIntyre’s claim that the adoption of Aristotle’s virtue ethics requires a radical rejection of the major institutions of liberalism is overstated. Yet some scholars also identify him as a philosophical source of radically reactionary politics and anti-liberalism. Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the world’s most influential Aristotelian political theorists.
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