VIRTUOUS LIVING - Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University

shallow roots in Marx, deeper roots in Fichte. In the second debate a conceptof rights which has Lockean antecedents is matched against a view ofuniversalisability which is recognisably Kantian and an appeal to the morallaw which is Thomist. In the third debate an argument which owes debts toT.H. Green and Rousseau competes with one which has Adam Smith as agrandfather (MacIntyre 1981:10).The point which MacIntyre is making here is that, such names bring to mind ahistorical dispensation which might mislead us. We might underestimate thecomplexity of history embedded in the intricate bodies of theory and practice whichconstitute human cultures, the beliefs of which the philosophers articulate onlypartially and selectively. However, the names suggested above indicate how wide andheterogeneous these fragments of moral sources are. These sources reduce our currentpluralist moral utterances to a shallow rhetoric and suspicious discourse. Thesuspicion, MacIntyre maintains, is based on the fact that “all those concepts whichinform our moral discourse were originally at home in larger totalities of theory andpractice in which they enjoyed a role and a function supplied by context of which theyhave now been deprived” (MacIntyre 1981:10). In the past 300 years, many conceptshave evolved in character, and evaluative expressions have changed their meaning sothat our contemporary understanding of “virtue”, “justice”, “piety”, “duty”, and theimperative language “you ought to” is different from what they meant in theirhistorical context. Moreover, reconstructing their historical contexts is neither helpfulnor possible (cf MacIntyre 1981:10).An interesting misnomer has gone on for a long time. This is the “unhistoricaltreatment of moral philosophy by contemporary philosophers in both the writingabout and teaching of the subject” (MacIntyre 1981:11). Often philosophers ofdifferent contexts are discussed as if they were contemporaries not only of each otherbut also of the contemporary debaters. Their views are often uprooted from thecultural influence that bore and gave them meaning. As such, their utterances acquireda kind of independence that transcends time, cultures, change, geographical location,and their influences. Could this be the effects of the theory of “emotivism”?MacIntyre cautions us of the dangers in the theory of emotivism.“Emotivism” is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and morespecifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference,159