MacIntyre and the Catch-22 of Aristotelian Moral Education
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
According to Alasdair MacIntyre, Aristotelian moral education is caught in a kind of Catch-22: We become virtuous by acting as a genuinely virtuous person would if they were in our shoes, but we cannot judge how a genuinely virtuous person would act without already possessing the intellectual and moral virtues!In my essay, I will take a closer look at this apparently vicious circle within Aristotelian moral education and at MacIntyre's attempt to escape it.I will argue (a) that MacIntyre's attempt fails because his explanation of how we can learn to become genuinely virtuous is incomplete; and (b) that his explanation is incomplete because MacIntyre lacks an account of intrinsic moral goodness.Finally, I will propose that developing an adequate conceptual framework for a genuinely Aristotelian moral education would require more attention to the quality of human experience than is found in MacIntyre's ethics of virtue.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it