Introduction to Political Philosophy

Community, Virtues, and Goods

As you read the material for the next class, keep the questions below in mind. To answer these questions you will have to reflect critically on what you have read and possibly re-read important passages. Keep in mind that there are two basic kinds of information that you need to look for in the readings.

  1. What are the main points or conclusions that an author accepts with respect to a particular issue?
  2. What are the reasons or important considerations that lead the author to accept that conclusion?

For our purposes, it is information of the latter sort (2) that will be our primary concern since our most basic task is to evaluate the reasons that are offered to support accepting one possible conclusion about an issue, rather than another. Although I strongly suggest that you write out brief answers to these questions, you do not have to turn in written responses. You do, however, need to be prepared to speak intelligently to these issues in the next class meeting.

Reading:

  • Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, “The Virtues, the Unity of a Human Life and the Concept of a Tradition”, pp. 204-225 (handout).
  • Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice, pp. 6-10, 64-67, 78-91, 312-314 (handout).

Questions:

  1. According to MacIntyre, what all is necessary to render a person’s action intelligible? Why can’t an action be understood in isolation? As a consequence to his answers to these questions, how does MacIntyre conceive the structure of human life? What is MacIntyre’s argument, in response to those who deny that life has this structure (like “Sartre/Roquentin”), that without such a structure the concepts of agency and personal identity are meaningless?
  2. With this structure of life understood, what gives it its unity? Why does it require a conception of the good? What is this conception supposed to do and how does it lead to an understanding of both virtue and tradition?
  3. Finally, how does all this lead MacIntyre to distinguish his conception of the person from that of “bureaucratic individualism”? Why is the former doomed to failure?
  4. What six propositions make up Walzer’s theory of goods and how does he understand justice? How is all this different from John Rawls’ theory of justice?
  5. What is the “sphere of security and welfare”? How is it related to community membership and communal provision? Walzer claims that a community must distribute according to need? How are these needs determined? What is there extent and how is this different from how Rawls would assess it?
  6. What three principles of communal provision does Walzer advance and how are they employed in the case of the American health care system?

 

I love Apache! So should you!