Editing Alasdair MacIntyre (section)

===''Dependent Rational Animals'' (1999)===

While ''After Virtue'' attempted to give an account of the virtues exclusively by recourse to social practices and the understanding of individual selves in light of "quests" and "traditions," ''Dependent Rational Animals'' was a self-conscious effort by MacIntyre to ground virtues in an account of biology, according to the view of Aquinas.<ref>MacIntyre says: “it is right to emphasise our [mine and Hebert McCabe’s] shared view that human agents are language using animals, something not taken seriously in the Neo-Thomist tradition”.(MacIntyre, in: ''My interview'', cit.)</ref> MacIntyre writes the following of this shift in the preface to the book: "Although there is indeed good reason to repudiate important elements in Aristotle's biology, I now judge that I was in error in supposing an ethics independent of biology to be possible."<ref>''Dependent Rational Animals'' (Chicago: Carus Publishing, 1999) x</ref>

More specifically, ''Dependent Rational Animals'' tries to make a [[Holism|holistic]] case on the basis of our best current knowledge (as opposed to an ahistorical, foundational claim) that "human vulnerability and disability" are the "central features of human life" and that Thomistic "virtues of dependency" are needed for individual human beings to flourish in their passage from stages of infancy to adulthood and old age.<ref name="Tasks_viii" /> As MacIntyre puts it: <blockquote>
It is most often to others that we owe our survival, let alone our flourishing ... It will be a central thesis of this book that the virtues that we need, if we are to develop from our animal condition into that of independent rational agents, and the virtues that we need, if we are to confront and respond to vulnerability and disability both in ourselves and in others, belong to one and the same set of virtues, the distinctive virtues of dependent rational animals<ref>''Dependent Rational Animals'', 1, 5</ref>
</blockquote>

Engaging with scientific texts on human biology as well as works of [[philosophical anthropology]], MacIntyre identifies the human species as existing on a continuous scale of both intelligence and dependency with other animals such as dolphins. One of his main goals is to undermine what he sees as the fiction of the disembodied, independent reasoner who determines ethical and moral questions autonomously and what he calls the "illusion of self-sufficiency" that runs through much of Western ethics culminating in Nietzsche's ''[[Übermensch]]''.<ref>''Dependent Rational Animals'', 127</ref> In its place he tries to show that our embodied dependencies are a definitive characteristic of our species and reveal the need for certain kinds of virtuous dispositions if we are ever to flourish into independent reasoners capable of weighing the intellectual intricacies of moral philosophy in the first place.