Rights, Virtue, and Others in MacIntyre: Community After the Fall demonstrates that human rights are not anathema to MacIntyre's vision of practices, virtue, and tradition, but rather are necessary to stop that vision being appropriated in problematic ways and to help it take those outside one's own community seriously. This work brings MacIntyre into extended conversation with historians such as Brian Tierney and Charles Reid as well as with postcolonial thinkers and theologians such as Edward Said and Willie James Jenning, demonstrating that each has something to say to MacIntyre about the limits of virtue's vision. MacIntyre's readings of historical theologians, including Ockham and Vitoria, are brought into question, with each being shown to demonstrate how rights can act to complete, rather than undermine MacIntyre's program. What emerges is a MacIntyrean understanding of rights in which they act as historically discerned constraints against the excesses of institutional power.
Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College at the University of Aberdeen and also serves as an associate tutor at the Scottish Episcopal Institute.
Dedication Acknowledgments Introduction Chapter 1: A World without Rights? Chapter 2: The Limits of Virtue's Vision Chapter 3: Rights as a Nominalist-Voluntarist Mistake? Chapter 4: Rights as Balanced Freedom Chapter 5: Vitoria, Colonialism, and Natural Law Chapter 6: Remaking the Ius Gentium Chapter 7: How to Listen to a Right Bibliography About the Author
Christians today often dismiss political ideas that are core to modern secular liberalism in a manner that leads them directly into the illiberal politics that has gained such force in the contemporary west. Rather than rejecting liberal politics outright, Joel Peirce offers a supple and conversation-opening call for Christian involvement in public discourse by showing us what core concepts like rights language are doing in our political discourse today. A wonderfully readable introduction to the political philosophy of Alisdair MacIntyre, who has so deeply influenced a whole generation of contemporary Christian modernity critics. -- Brian Brock, University of Aberdeen Is there an alliance between Christian fans of Alasdair MacIntyre and illiberal nationalism? Exactly twenty years ago, Jeffrey Stout warned of such a link if MacIntyre continued to be taught in American seminaries. Now, with populism on the rise, Joel Pierce delivers a careful answer. Pierce argues for a novel reading of Vitoria's law of nations that follows in MacIntyre's footsteps but displays greater global inclusion, dialogue, and humility. -- John Perry, University of St. Andrews, Scotland
