ABSTRACT
In any account of virtue ethics, the self must play a prominent role, and with Alasdair MacIntyre and Stanley Hauerwas, this is no different. This chapter examines several of their presuppositions about the self. MacIntyre makes the most explicit statement about that self when he rebuts Nietzsche's genealogical view that there is no self apart from masks humans wear. Speaking quite self-consciously from within a linguistic viewpoint, MacIntyre, Hauerwas and even Brad J. Kallenberg depict a self that always works within language and fundamentally is a rule-follower. Within one way of life, a self becomes determinate, but that determinacy does not seem transferable to other communities, since there are no identities and their worlds have been made determinate according to their own linguistic use. MacIntyre focuses upon enacted narratives, as opposed to, perhaps, fictional ones, since he is concerned with real human lives which may become virtuous.
