MACINTYRE, Alasdair. Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. xiii + 322 pp. Cloth, $49.99--In 1966 Alasdair MacIntyre published A Short History of Ethics, a brilliantly subversive if highly selective treatment of the main line of Western moral philosophy that remains in print. MacIntyre has joked that ever since that book's appearance he has been engaged in writing an interminably long history of ethics, one that encompasses his trilogy of After Virtue (1981), Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990). Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity is not a history; nevertheless, MacIntyre's historical method and subversive aims, so central to the influential 1966 book, still powerfully animate this volume published almost exactly a half century later. The book contains a direct and extended confrontation between MacIntyre's Thomistic-Aristotelian approach to ethics and that of the modern West.

The book is laid out in five large chapters. The first begins by asking how desires can lead people's lives to go badly and argues that making progress on this question requires asking what and under what circumstances desires can count as good reasons for action. This in turn leads to philosophical questions about goods themselves and therefore into the theory of practical reasoning. In contemporary philosophy this leads into the disagreements associated with the doctrine known now as "expressivism," a successor to the emotivism that played such a key role in the early part of After Virtue, as expounded especially in the work of Alan Gibbard and Simon Blackburn, supplemented by resources only to be found in Nietzsche and Harry Frankfort, the last of whom emerges as one of the most indicative moral thinkers of recent times. The chapter ends with a kind of impasse between expressivism and MacIntyre's own neo-Aristotelian view. Expressivism does, however, seem to describe well the culture of modernity while also exposing incoherences in what MacIntyre calls throughout "Morality," meaning the morality of modern West, a view that presents itself as the universal morality of all rational persons, but that is really the particular product of a certain time and social order.

In the second chapter, then, MacIntyre addresses that social order by way of an inquiry into the relationship between certain moral views and certain social structures and practices. The key transition here is from a context in which Aquinas's moral thought was taken for granted into one in which it was almost invisible and for which David Hume is taken to be the key spokesman. The deep structure of the change from one to the other is visible with the aid of Marx's account of the rise of capitalism, an economic system with far reaching effects on how morality is understood, effects that systematically distort agents' understanding of their own good.

The third chapter presents a historical and sociological account of modernity centered on the mutually reinforcing relationship of the capitalist market and the modern state, which simultaneously works to impose a particular morality and prevent discussion of alternatives. MacIntyre argues that we can see successively in the work of Oscar Wilde, D. H. Lawrence, and especially Bernard Williams the shortcomings and distortions of modern morality. Williams's concern for authenticity and the dangers of self-deception pose stiff challenges to the modern moral project, but MacIntyre argues that his view ultimately lacks the resources needed to get beyond them. Here we need to acquire some distance from ourselves and to be able, as it were, to examine our desires and reasons from the outside and according to standards that apply not only to me, but to others who may be similarly situated. MacIntyre identifies such a perspective with his own Thomistic-Aristotelianism, and it is against Williams's own objections to Aristotelianism that MacIntyre sketches his alternative in the book's fourth chapter. Here MacIntyre ranges widely over issues in the interpretation of Aristotle, attempts by contemporary communities in Denmark and Brazil to preserve their local autonomy against both state and market, and recent literature on happiness by economists and psychologists, all in the service of making his case for a contemporary neo-Aristotelianism, and he replies explicitly to what he takes to be Williams's main arguments against his view. The main work of the chapter is to show how on the Thomistic-Aristotelian view persons come to understand their moral obligations through reflection on their desires in pursuit of goods both individual and common. It is the pursuit of the common goods, however, that lead them into relationships that provide both salutary distance from their own desires and occasions for comm on deliberation that contribute both to the development of the right virtues and to deeper understanding of goods. It is through such practical and local cooperative activities that we learn and develop as practical reasoners, but it is precisely those activities that are often impeded by the social, political, and economic structures of the modern world, which are grounded in a model of practical reasoning as maximizing preference satisfaction, bounded, often in ways that are contradictory, by the rules of "Morality," and managed through political structures that consist mainly of bargaining among disproportionately wealthy and privileged elites.

The fifth and final chapter is meant to show the importance of narrative in the kind of moral thinking MacIntyre champions, not least in its exemplary illustration of the mistakes and consequent learning that make up the lives of reflective and self-critical practical reasoners--in these cases, four practical reasoners from whom MacIntyre claims to have learned important things: the Soviet novelist Vasily Grossman, the American Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the Anglo-Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James, and the Irish Catholic priest Dennis Faul.

Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity is now MacIntyre's principle statement of his views about moral and political philosophy; it is a view with which many will disagree, but this fulsome statement, dense with insights and arguments over a wide range of topics, will provide great and rewarding labor on questions that cannot be avoided.--V. Bradley Lewis, The Catholic University of America