Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Patreon.com slash Philosophize

This. This. Philosophical writing on Substack at Philosophize This on there. I hope you love the show today.

So there's a pretty innocent statement I want to start this episode with. That, by the way,

I'll return back to throughout the episode and no doubt annoy some of you with it along the way. Just doing my

job here. But it is a crucial piece of information that we need to remember if we want to understand

where Alistair McIntyre is starting his thinking from for the rest of his work. A big point

that'll ground all the rest he has to say is that there is no view from nowhere when it comes

to statements that we make about morality or value.

That is something we need to remember is a guarantee of what we even mean when we're talking about

morality as a concept. And you know, it's easy to forget that this is a premise he's always

operating from. But just remember all we talked about last time when we went over his book

after virtue, that when

we try to remove teleology from moral discussion or any shared ideas about what a human life

is for.

In other words, when a view from nowhere becomes your biggest goal in moral conversation, then

what we end up with is something like a hellscape of emotivism.

Kind of world we live in today, he thinks. A world where people

in good faith often have what looks like moral conversation, but they almost always end up with

something at the end of it that's deeply unsatisfying and barely productive. Moral conversation becomes

incommensurable, he says, without a shared conception of the good. And if this is what he

tried to diagnose about the world and after virtue, then what he tries to do in the next two

books he writes, what we're talking about today, is him giving a much more detailed account

...