Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues - Softcover

'Alasdair MacIntyre ... is the ultimate iconoclast of contemporary Western culture' Brenda Almond, Times Higher Education Supplement. 'MacIntyre offers us here a profound and timely reflection on the complex interaction between independence and dependence in human life. The book will be read with profit not only by professional philosophers, but by anyone who is concerned about the marginalization of the needy and vulnerable in today's society' Jean Porter, The Tablet.

Where should an account of the virtues begin? In "Dependent Rational Animals", Alasdair MacIntyre argues that we should begin with those facts of vulnerability and disability, and of consequent dependence on others, to which moral philosophers have generally given insufficient attention, and with the animal nature of human beings - that which exhibits their kinship to members of other intelligent species. He argues that it is by reference to these that we become able to understand the part played in our lives both by the virtues of independent practical reasoning and by the virtues of an acknowledged dependence on others.