Virtue as Part of Our Story

Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue reconnected thinking about ethics back to virtue by connecting virtue to the story a life is a part of. In order to know how we ought to live, we first need to answer the question, “of which story am I a part?” According to MacIntyre, each life is a story, “specifically a play in [the] genre of tragedy, because each life ends in death.” We lose sight of this because we divide life into distinct spheres that hardly touch at all: work and leisure, private and public, corporate and personal. But virtue is excellence of the whole character and…