Book review: After Virtue (A. MacIntyre)
When I was a boy, I remember seeing on TV people having serious hang-ups because of “moral dilemmas”. I wasn’t sure what the fuss was about, but once it settled in, it seemed frightening as an invisible virus. And by the brooding eyes of the characters, it looked just as deadly. It never occurred me that one day such a disgrace would befall me. So, in the first sign of a moral dilemma, I sought succour from MacIntyre’s book.
Much brighter people told me he’s an icon of modern philosophy, so I won’t touch his merit as a scholar. But I can speak about his writing style, and how I could use four of his paragraphs to make a room. It takes minimal effort to insert half an inch of blank space and exponentially improve reading flow. It’s called indentation, the next best invention after sliced bread. Walls of text were already cringeworthy on game forums during pre-modern Internet, and I would never imagine I would live to witness them edited into serious e-books.
How about clarity then? Take this sentence which I wrested from one such wall of texts, for example:
“For the outcome of that history, some aspects of which I sketched in the preceding chapter, has not only been an inability to agree upon a catalogue of the virtues and an even more fundamental inability to agree upon the relative importance of the virtue concepts within a moral scheme in which notions of rights and of utility also have a key place.”
I dare you not to read it at least twice. Or thrice. Philosophy is too abstract in its own right, so why not write about it with clarity?
And yet, I haven’t overcome my moral dilemma. I’ll try a simpler, over-the-counter drug next time.