After virtue

What Hacker News says

1. taylorlapeyreDec 2025
   I've recently read the great moral philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre's book "After Virtue", and in it he defines a "practice" as:

   > "any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. Tic-tac- toe is not an example of a practice in this sense, nor is throwing a football with skill; but the game of football is, and so is chess. Bricklaying is not a practice; architecture is. Planting turnips is not a practice; farming is. So are the enquiries of physics, chemistry and biology, and so is the work of the historian, and so are painting and music. In the ancient and medieval worlds the creation and sustaining of human communities-of households, cities, nations-is generally taken to be a practice in the sense in which I have defined it. Thus the range of practices is wide: arts, sciences, games, politics in the Aristotelian sense, the making and sustaining of family life, all fall under the concept."

   Programming is a practice (especially during the golden era of open source software), with its own "internal goods" such as described by this article: the pleasure of optimizing an algorithm, the "ah-ha" of finding a great root cause, the beauty of a well-written function, the fun of it.

   MacIntyre also says that practices can only be incubated and cultivated within "institutions" - organizations which specifically exist to protect the development of a practice from the intrusion of external goods, by careful management of external goods. But institutions can become corrupted and degrade the practices within them. And indeed recently programming has been degraded into a simple skill used to obtain external goods, namely wealth and fame, and the institutions where programming tends to be cultivated tend to have deeply corrupted themselves. One can still recognize people in tech companies that fight against this tendency, but it's a remarkable confirmation of his thesis in my opinion.

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2. TimorousBestieNov 2025
   The best statement of virtue ethics is contained in Alasdair Macintyre’s _After Virtue_. It’s a metaethical foundation that argues that both deontology and utilitarianism are incoherent and have failed to explain what some unitary “the good” is, and that ancient notions of “virtues” (some of which have filtered down to present day) can capture facets of that good better.

   The big advantage of virtue ethics from my point of view is that humans have unarguably evolved cognitive mechanisms for evaluating some virtues (“loyalty”, “friendship”, “moderation”, etc.) but nobody seriously argues that we have a similarly built-in notion of “utility”.

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3. svieiraSep 2025
   "Another voice on the subject at hand" is definitely available - but simply searching "{Christian, Catholic} {[SUBJECT MATTER], [KIND OF MATERIAL]" will often unearth some good starting points. E. g. "Christian social periodical" will eventually lead you to https://firstthings.com/ (as an example).

   Some suggestions for a variety of subjects:

   * Fr. Stanley Jaki on Physics and the philosophy of science - I am working through https://www.abebooks.com/9780895267498/God-Cosmologists-Jaki...

   * Philosophy in general, Peter Kreeft (I recommend "Jesus Shock", it's amazing how "used" to Christ we've become, and this book does a good job of pointing out just how different the reactions to him are) and Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue) are both good "recent" authors.

   * Bioethics and philosophy https://www.abebooks.com/first-edition/Bioethics-Limits-Scie... (I will freely admit to bias here, but this is easy to read, clear, and to the point)

   * Particularly interesting in the moment: https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-limits-...

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4. sisoesMay 2025
   I am not Roman Catholic anymore, but I read After Virtue shortly after I graduated from college and it fundamentally changed my moral worldview for the better. I owe him a great debt.

   Requiescat in pace.

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5. digiconfuciusMay 2025
   After Virtue was one of my favorite books, and it helped me get started learning about the history of ideas. I knew he was getting older, but I'm saddened to see him pass. In college, I had hoped that I could meet him one day. Rest in peace.
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6. sisoesMay 2025
   Eastern Orthodox Christian. After Virtue is not a specifically Roman Catholic work, even though MacIntyre started slowly agree with its Aristotelian ethical system, and I still recommend the book to anyone willing to put in the work to understand it.
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