Rights, Virtue, and Others in MacIntyre

This book argues that rights complete rather than undermine the ethical and political vision of Alasdair MacIntyre. It does so through bringing MacIntyre into conversation with medieval historians, contemporary theologians, and postcolonial thinkers, demonstrating how his thought can be extended through their insights.

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Rights, Virtue, and Others in MacIntyre: Community After the Fall demonstrates that human rights are not anathema to MacIntyre’s vision of practices, virtue, and tradition, but rather are necessary to stop that vision being appropriated in problematic ways and to help it take those outside one’s own community seriously. This work brings MacIntyre into extended conversation with historians such as Brian Tierney and Charles Reid as well as with postcolonial thinkers and theologians such as Edward Said and Willie James Jenning, demonstrating that each has something to say to MacIntyre about the limits of virtue’s vision. MacIntyre’s readings of historical theologians, including Ockham and Vitoria, are brought into question, with each being shown to demonstrate how rights can act to complete, rather than undermine MacIntyre’s program. What emerges is a MacIntyrean understanding of rights in which they act as historically discerned constraints against the excesses of institutional power.