Alasdair MacIntyre

(1929 - 2025)

‘Applied ethics’, as that expression is now used, is a single rubric for a large range of different theoretical and practical activities. Such rubrics function partly as a protective device both within the academic community and outside it; a name of this kind suggests not just a discipline, but a particular type of discipline. In the case of ‘applied ethics’ the suggestive power of the name derives from a particular conception of the relationship of ethics to what goes on under the rubric of ‘applied ethics’. Not everyone who conducts activities under that rubric owes allegiance to this conception and there are doubtless some who would repudiate it as strongly as I do. But it is that dominant conception from which most work in this area derives or aspires to derive its philosophical legitimacy. What is that conception?

The question posed in this paper is: Is there an end to some type of activity which is the end of any rational agent? It approaches an answer by a critical examination of one view of human beings that excludes this possibility, that advanced by Harry Frankfurt. It is argued that once we have distinguished, as Frankfurt does not, that which we have good reason to care about from that which we do not have good reason to care about, we are able to identify a conception of a final end for human activity, one that we put to work when wee consider the ways in which a life may have gone wrong and one that we find indispensable for our understanding of narrative

The central task to which contemporary moral philosophers have addressed themselves is that of listing the distinctive characteristics of moral utterances. In this paper I am concerned to propound an entirely negative thesis about these characteristics. It is widely held that it is of the essence of moral valuations that they are universalisable and prescriptive. This is the contention which I wish to deny. I shall proceed by first examining the thesis that moral judgments are necessarily and essentially universalisable and then the thesis that their distinctive function is a prescriptive one. But as the argument proceeds I shall be unable to separate the discussion of the latter thesis from that of the former.