Partially Examined Life podcast - MacIntyre on Moral Theory

On Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1981), mostly ch. 3-7 and 14-17.

What justifies ethical claims? MacIntyre claims that no modern attempt to ground ethics has worked, and that's because we've abandoned Aristotle. We see facts and values as fundamentally different: the things science discovers vs. these weird things that have nothing to do with science. In Aristotle's teleological view, everything comes with built-in goals, so just as a plant will aim grow green and healthy, people have a definite kind of virtue towards which we do and should naturally strive. Though MacIntyre doesn't want to bring back Aristotle's biology, he does want to put the goal-directedness, i.e. the normativity, back into our conception of the facts of our lives.

You can find the entire unabridged MacIntyre podcast, along with dozens of others discussing philosophers from Aristotle to Wittgenstein, at the Partially Examined Life website: http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com

About PEL: The podcasters were all graduate students in philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin back in the Clinton years. They all left the program at some point before getting their doctorates and have consequently since had time to get outside that whole weird world of academia and reflect on it and the various philosophical topics with a different, and probably much more lazy, perspective.