ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with Alasdair MacIntyre, arguably the more ambitious in terms of the breadth and generality of his analysis. In After Virtue, MacIntyre sets himself a twofold task: first, to uncover the historical forces which have imbued our culture with emotivist tendencies and practices, and then, in light of this analysis, to examine the possibility of restoring objective and impersonal standards to moral debate. In order to understand the emotivist culture, he argues that we must first understand why the Enlightenment project of rationally justifying morality had to fail. The purpose of morality is to improve and reform human nature as it happens to be, to move it from its untutored state to its true end, then it becomes difficult to know how we are to proceed if we have banished the possibility of articulating a human telos. Here we are thrust back to the same set of relativistic worries which attend to MacIntyre's characterization of the emotivist culture.
