Virtue is not what it used to be. It has lost its good name. If
virtue were a television show, it would garner low ratings and
promptly be cancelled. If virtue were running for president, it
would fare poorly in the Iowa caucuses and would drop out of the
race after a weak showing in the New Hampshire primary. Virtue has
a bad name, both because people no longer use the term and because
it is associated with repression of desires. Today, it not
considered healthy to keep inner urges at bay for very long. Virtue
comes off looking like a relic of a quaint, narrow-minded, uptight
age. Virtue does not support self-esteem since it is difficult to
master the passions. Yet virtue seems to be a part of everyday
life. What accounts for the kindly relationships between people?
Why are most people peaceful, law abiding, and decent? If, as some
insist, there is no foundation for virtue, or people act only out
of self-interest, how can we explain why so many people are good to
each other? Prestigious scholars, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, After
Virtue, James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense, Steven Pinker, The Better
Angels of Our Nature, and Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness, have
attempted to answer this question. While these authors make great
strides in explaining the character of goodness, their works do not
face the problem raised by "anti-foundationalist."
Anti-foundationalist such as Richard Rorty, Friedrich Nietzsche,
Martin Heidegger, and the libertarian school of economics maintain
that humans lack a capacity for comprehending what is good or bad.
For anti-foundationalists there are no higher metaphysical
principles that guide behavior. Prescriptive judgments are little
more than long-held cultural prejudices fortified by habit so as to
seem natural. Therefore, philosophic claims about virtue are little
more than guesses about proper conduct. Nature's Virtue squarely
faces the challenge of anti-foundationalists. The book points out
the defects of these ideas. It does so by presenting a contemporary
restatement of the case for grounding virtue in Platonic forms or
ideas.
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