ABSTRACT
As a second major player in contemporary virtue ethics, Stanley Hauerwas has embraced many of Alasdair MacIntyre's positions in order to develop his own narrative-based Christian ethics within a Protestant tradition. This chapter explores Hauerwas's own approach to ethics, and, as with MacIntyre, it seeks to understand the importance of his own views of language. Hauerwas contends that contemporary ethics has been molded definitively by Enlightenment thought. He thinks liberalism perpetuates a necessarily violent, coercive system that appeals to supposedly neutral, bureaucratic procedures to achieve impartiality and justice. By fostering self-interested individuals who are seen atomistically, liberalism focuses upon the good of the individual as autonomous, apart from any story or community. In both Kallenberg's Wittgenstein and Hauerwas, we will find them eschewing theory, or systems building, and embracing praxis. By stressing narrative, Hauerwas can account for a retrospective view of self, one which embraces its history and particularity, since such a self is narratively constituted.
