Boss, Marc
The moral philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre: A historicist defence of the categorical imperative
- 2020.
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The moral philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre is based on an openly historicist epistemology. Historicism is typically accused of dissolving into relativism since it rejects any claim to an absolute knowledge that could offer the final word in history, but MacIntyre’s thesis maintains, despite a claimed fallibility, that evaluative discourses can be subject to rationally justifiable norms of decidability. In light of the corollary theses of the rationality of traditions and the constitutive indeterminacy of conceptions of the good, this article suggests that MacIntyre’s historicism renews the main characteristics of a moral categorical imperative within a theoretical framework that provides an alternative to that of Kant.