Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the world's most influential living moral philosophers. He has written 30 books on ethics and held a variety of professorial chairs over the past four decades in North America.
The way things are does not determine the way they ought to be
'Right' and 'wrong' aren't words a linguist uses.
Science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgements of all kinds remain necessary.
I'm offended by the is-ought fallacy, which has been used to justify slavery, women not being allowed to vote, children working in factories.
No path leads from a knowledge of that which is to that which should be.
There is no conceivable human action which custom has not at one time justified and at another condemned.
Science doesn't tell us what we should do. It only tells us what is.
I conceive ethics as a branch of psychology.
The idea that laws decide what is right or wrong is mistaken in general. Laws are, at their best, an attempt to achieve justice; to say that laws define justice or ethical conduct is turning things upside down.
The morality of customs,the spirit of the laws, produces the man emancipated from the law.
One of the great problems of philosophy is the relationship between the realm of knowledge and the realm of values. Knowledge is what is; values are what ought to be.
To look for a single general theory of how to decide the right thing to do is like looking for a single theory of how to decide what to believe.
I would say that all traditional philosophies up to and including Marxism have tried to derive the 'ought' from the 'is.' My point of view is that this is impossible; this is a farce.
