p.48 precisely which of our desires are to be acknowledged as legitimate
guides to action, and which on the other hand are to be inhibited, frustrated or re-educated; and clearly this question
cannot be answered by trying to use our desires themselves as some sort of criterion. Just because all of us have, actually
or potentially, numerous desires, many of them conflicting and mutually incompatible, we have to decide between the
rival claims of the rival desires. We have to decide in what direction to educate our desires, how to order
a variety of impulses, felt needs, emotions and purposes. Hence those rules which enable us to decide between the
claims of, and so to order, our desires... cannot themselves be derived from or justified by reference to the desires among
which they have to arbitrate.
p.48 Hume... understands particular... judgments as expressions of feeling, of the passions, for it
is the passions and not reason which move us to action.
p.72 Unmasking the unacknowledged motives of arbitrary will and desire which sustain the moral
masks of modernity is itself one of the most characteristically modern of activities.
p.97-98 if I am right the conditions of success include the ability to deceive successfully
and hence it is the defeated whom we are more likely to be able to understand and it is those who are going to be defeated
whose behavior we are more likely to be able to predict.
p.122 the virtues just are those qualities which sustain a free man
in his role and which manifest themselves in those actions which his role requires.
p.161-162 Practical reasoning then has, on Aristotle's view, four essential elements. There are first of
all the wants and goals of the agent... The second element is the major premise, an assertion to the effect that doing or
having or seeking such-and-such is the type of thing that is good for or needed by a so-and-so... The third element is the
minor premise wherein an agent, relying on a perceptual judgment, asserts that this is an instance or occasion of the requisite
kind. The conclusion, as I have already said, is the action.
p.191 A virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us
to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such
goods... it is not difficult to show for a whole range of key virtues that without them the goods internal to
practices are barred to us, but not just barred to us generally, barred in a very particular way.
p.195 the ability of a practice to retain its integrity will depend on the way in which the virtues can
be and are exercised in sustaining the institutional forms which are the social bearers of the practice.
p.208 There is no such thing as 'behavior', to be identified prior to and independently of intentions, beliefs
and settings.
p.208 We identify a particular action only by invoking two kinds of context, implicitly if not explicitly.
We place the agent's intentions... in causal and temporal order with reference to their role in his or her history; and we
also place them with reference to their role in the history of the setting or settings to which they belong. In doing this,
in determining what causal efficacy the agent's intentions had in one or more directions, and how his short-term intentions
succeeded or failed to be constitutive of long-term intentions, we ourselves write a further part of these histories. Narrative
history of a certain kind turns out to be the basic and essential genre for the characterization of human actions.
p.211 in successfully identifying and understanding what someone else is doing we always move towards placing
a particular episode in the context of a set of narrative histories, histories both of the individuals concerned and of the
settings in which they act and suffer.
p.212 It is because we all live out narratives in our lives and because we understand our own lives in terms
of the narratives that we live out that the form of narrative is appropriate for understanding the actions of others.
p.213 Only in fantasy do we live what story we please. In life... we are always under certain constraints.
We enter upon a stage which we did not design and we find ourselves part of an action that was not of our making.
p.214 An action is a moment in a possible or actual history or in a number of such histories.
p.214 Human life is composed of discrete actions which lead nowhere, which have no order; the story-teller
imposes on human events retrospectively an order which they did not have while they were lived.
p.214 We [MacIntyre and Sartre/Roquentin] agree in identifying the intelligibility of an action with its
place in a narrative sequence.
p.215 What I have called a history is an enacted dramatic narrative in which the characters are also the
authors.
p.216 man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling
animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth.
p.216 I can only answer the question 'What am I to do?' if I can answer
the prior question 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?'
p.216 I suggested earlier that 'an' action is always an episode in a possible
history
p.219 The virtues therefore are to be understood as those dispositions which will
not only sustain practices and enable us to achieve the goods internal to practices, but which will also sustain us in the
relevant kind of quest for the good, by enabling us to overcome the harms, dangers, temptations and distractions which we
encounter, and which will furnish us with increasing self-knowledge and increasing knowledge
of the good.
p.221 And thus, insofar as the virtues sustain the relationship required for practices,
they have to sustain relationships to the past - and to the future - as well as the present.
p.222-223 What then sustains and strengthens traditions? What weakens
and destroys them?
The answer in key part is: the exercise or the lack of exercise of the relevant virtues.
The virtues find their point and purpose... in sustaining those relationships necessary if the variety of goods internal
to practices are to be achieved
