Integration Of Justice And Virtue

MacIntyre is one of contemporary thinkers who advocate a new theory of virtue. With original opinions on justice, he works out his theory of virtue-justice. The problems of justice and their concerned theoretical dilemma in contemporary western society bring his theory into being. Social and political crises and moral predicament act as the actual background for his theory, whereas other western thinkers' theory of justice and his own new theory of virtue serve as the academic background exterior and interior respectively.Historical argumentation plays an important role in Maclntyre' s theory of justice. Synchronically, he criticizes contemporary liberalist theory of justice characterized by J. Rawls and R. Nozick, etc, pointing out its obvious limitations owing to its overbalance to the rules of justice. Diachronically, he traces back to four kinds of traditional theory of justice, i.e. the classical Aristotelianist tradition, the Bible tradition, the Scottish didacticism tradition, and the modern liberalist tradition, and analyses their respective rationality. He urges that a theory of virtue-justice be established by means of the revival of the Aristotelian theory of virtue.Maclntyre puts into consideration a few issues of justice such as the connotation, essence, metaphysical foundation, types and functions of justice. He explores the etymological meaning of justice, finding its double meaning of both the rule and virtue; he discovers that the essence of justice lies in how to deal with all kinds of interest relations, in the distribution of social goods according to the principle of desert and in respect of everyone's identification and moral quality; he points out that the metaphysical foundation of justice has, relative to that of virtue, gone through the transition of theologically metaphysical deontology from originally biological metaphysics; he classifies justice into two types: citizens' justice of equality and communities' or polis'...