Did Benedict XVI Take a Page Out of MacIntyres Book?
I have a theory about why Joseph Ratzinger chose the papal name “Benedict:” he took his inspiration from Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. In After Virtue, written in 1984, MacIntyre argues that the Enlightenment project to establish a rational basis for morality has failed. He advocates a return to an Aristotelian-Catholic tradition, as the only viable alternative to Nietzschean moral nihilism. MacIntyre has since become the leading light of virtue ethics, and one of the most influential Catholic moral philosophers. Here is the final paragraph of After Virtue: “It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned
