REFERENCES
- The themes of vulnerability and dependency have been well worked not only in recent feminist philosophy but also, under the rubrics of finitude and intersubjectivity, by hermeneutical thinkers such as Gadamer and Ricoeur. Although Maclntyre has on other occasions shown sympathy with these thinkers, he may feel that the extreme absence of nature and animality from their discourse -- preoccupied as it is with language -- makes it vulnerable to attack either from the reductive naturalism of socio-biologists and evolutionary psychologists or the unrepressed vitalism of the Nitezschean rhetoric of man as 'the clever animal'. The importance of outflanking these two adversaries -- by not conceding nature and animality to them -- may be a real if unstated motivation in DRA.
- Annette Baier had already accorded MacIntyre 'the status of honorary wom[a]n'. See 'What do Women Want in a Moral Theory?', in Roger Crisp and Michael Slote (eds) Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997; reprinted from Baier, Moral Prejudices (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994)).
- See, e.g., WJWR, pp. 169 and 176.
- For a helpful exception, see David Carr and Jan Steutel (eds) Virtue Theory and Moral Education (London: Routledge, 1999).
- MacIntyre does not mention exceptions here; but advertence might be made to, e.g., Stephen L. Clark, The Nature of the Beast Are Animals Moral? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Mary Midgely, Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (London: Routledge, 1995); or for a critique, paralleling MacIntyre's, of Heidegger's stark separation of human and animal, Simon Glendinning, 'Heidegger and the Question of Animality', International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 4(1) (1996), pp. 67-86. It is worth noting that although DRA is a book on ethics in which animals are given a conspicuous part, it gives no attention -- unlike the works of dark and Midgely to ethical issues with respect to the treatment of non-human animals by humans.
- This would not be the case if what MacIntyre presents as his new acknowledgement of the biological basis of ethics included, as it does not, the kind of argument, for example, that Frans de Waal advances for justice as an orientation in some primates as well in humans in Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996) or the kind of considerations that lead J. Q. Wilson to posit some basic moral sentiments as natural human endowments in The Moral Sense (New York: Free Press, 1993).
- MacIntyre has not, to my knowledge, written about Levinas. But he does briefly advert to the striking affinities between Levinas's thought and that of the Danish philosopher-theologian Knud Ejler Løgstrup in his very sympathetic introduction (co-authored with Hans Fink) to a new English translation of Løgstrup's The Ethical Demand (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997). Although Løgstrup is nowhere mentioned in DRA, one may wonder whether his influence is not present in it.
- Reason is stretched here in dealing with what is precisely beyond reason in that it either happens to me contingently (as in an accident at birth) or is imposed by a necessity of nature (as in the growing infirmity of old age); MacIntyre explicitly excludes from the circle of what obligates to responsive giving misfortunes that result from a person's own deliberate wrongdoing (p. 128; though for possible qualification here, see p. 124). It would be interesting to clarify, as I cannot do here, why there are deep differences, in determining an acceptable basis for justice, between a MacIntyrean saying 'this could have been me' and a Rawlsian surveying (from behind the 'veil of ignorance') all the possible positions she might occupy as a result of the 'natural lottery'. (Apparent convergence here might seem to be reinforced by the fact that whereas in his chapter on justice in AV MacIntyre sharply distinguishes his own 'desert'-based conception from Rawls's 'needs'-based conception of justice, in DRA need seems to have superseded -- though not indeed replaced -- desert as the decisive consideration for a just socio-political order.)
- The phrase is Charles Taylor's; see his essay with this title in Amartya Sen and Bernard Willimas (eds) Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 129-44.
- Raimond Gaita, A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice (London: Routledge, 2000).
- In Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (eds) Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 3-28.
- This absence does not figure among the four areas of 'unfinished philosophical business in these pages' that MacIntyre acknowledges in the preface to DRA (p. xii).