Young children help others in a range of situations, relatively indiscriminate of the characteristics of those they help. Recent results have suggested that young children’s helping behaviour extends even to humanoid robots. However, it has been unclear how characteristics of robots would influence children’s helping behaviour. Considering previous findings suggesting that certain robot features influence adults’ perception of and their behaviour towards robots, the question arises of whether young children’s behaviour and perception would follow the same principles. The current study (...) investigated whether two key characteristics of a humanoid robot (animate autonomy and friendly expressiveness) would affect children’s instrumental helping behaviour and their perception of the robot as an animate being. Eighty-two 3-year-old children participated in one of four experimental conditions manipulating a robot’s ostensible animate autonomy (high/low) and friendly expressiveness (friendly/neutral). Helping was assessed in an out-of-reach task and animacy ratings were assessed in a post-test interview. Results suggested that both children’s helping behaviour, as well as their perception of the robot as animate, were unaffected by the robot’s characteristics. The findings indicate that young children’s helping behaviour extends largely indiscriminately across two important characteristics. These results increase our understanding of the development of children’s altruistic behaviour and animate-inanimate distinctions. Our findings also raise important ethical questions for the field of child-robot interaction. (shrink)

Marginalized people have used body aesthetic practices, such as clothing and hairstyles, to communicate their worth to the mainstream. One such example is respectability politics, a set of practices developed in post-Reconstruction black communities to prevent sexual assault and convey moral standing to the white mainstream. Respectability politics is an ambivalent strategy. It requires assimilation to white bourgeois aesthetic and ethical standards, and so guides practitioners toward blandness and bodily erasure. Yet, it is an aesthetic practice that cultivates moral agency (...) and helps communities avoid violence and meet social and economic goals. I contrast respectability politics with the anti-assimilationist body aesthetics of Chike Jeffers and Janell Hobson. Because these accounts do not seek to neutralize or erase the body, they fundamentally value black people. As such, they more effectively convey personhood than assimilationist strategies do and also demonstrate the positive role that body aesthetics can play in everyday ethical projects. (shrink)

The paper examines representative cases of ``dishonest'' voting. In all but one case the claim that ``strategic voting'' is ``dishonest'' is refuted. In all cases the effects of ``misrepresentation'' need never harm any majority. Indeed majorities may benefit from ``strategy'' (in non-cycle cases too). In fact democracy demands ``strategy''. Although the universal value of the choice set is disputed even in the one recalcitrant case, the result is, after all, an element in the ``honest'' choice set.

The paper examines representative cases of ``dishonest'''' voting. In all but one case the claim that ``strategic voting'''' is ``dishonest'''' is refuted. In all cases the effects of ``misrepresentation'''' need never harm any majority. Indeed majorities may benefit from ``strategy'''' (in non-cycle cases too). In fact democracy demands ``strategy''''. Although the universal value of the choice set is disputed even in the one recalcitrant case, the result is, after all, an element in the ``honest'''' choice set.

Voters satisfy maximin or maximax in their choices between sets of alternatives and secure a Pareto improvement by all voting strategically under simple majority voting for particular sincere preferences. Thus the assumption that strategic voting is a bad thing is challenged and the idea that we should reject voting because of the possibility of misrepresentation dismissed.

A model is “any representation or concept that helps us to understand the world whenever common sense or direct observations are inadequate.” Common sense and direct observation often prove inadequate to the complexities of the twenty-first-century cities. Thus, models abound in urban life and governance. However, a model is not only a tool for control but a way of defining a situation. Framing the city so as to render it susceptible to interpretation and intervention is an exercise not merely with (...) scientific or technological value but with rhetorical power. The tradition of comprehensive urban models, beginning with the advent of computers and culminating in the self-analyzing “smart city,” I argue, sidelines this rhetorical power in favor of a tone of scientific authority that, while justifiable in technical domains, does not legitimately scale to the level of a political community. Making good on the civic potential of Big Data thus requires recontextualizing properly scientific enterprises within an adequate political philosophy of the city, allowing for the construction of cultural urban models that set human freedom at the core of its inner workings. (shrink)

In keeping with the general theme of the General Assembly of CIPSH in Beijing, 2004, in this article I emphasize the potential of the internet to impact the use of works of art in public and private museums for study and research, and for the publication of research. The possibility exists nowadays of creating a hyper-real ‘musée imaginaire’ or ‘museum without walls’ to use André Malraux's phrase of more than fifty years ago. It is hard to see how it could (...) be anything but a benefit to human knowledge to have images of all works in the public domain (that is, for which the creator's copyright has expired) available on the world wide web. Under US law this year (2006) that would mean all works created before 1911. There are encouraging developments in that direction, but there is also constant legal wrangling. And I have to admit there are sometimes two sides to the question, even if I think one argument is far stronger than the other. (shrink)

A geographically stratified cross-sectional survey was conducted in 2002 to investigate household-level factors associated with use of mosquito control measures and self-reported malaria in Malindi, Kenya. A total of 629 households were surveyed. Logistic regressions were used to analyse the data. Half of all households (51%) reported all occupants using an insecticide-treated bed net and at least one additional mosquito control measure such as insecticides or removal of standing water. Forty-nine per cent reported a history of malaria in the household. (...) Of the thirteen household factors analysed, low (OR=0·23, CI 0·11, 0·48) and medium (OR=0·50, CI 0·29, 0·86) education, mudcoral (OR=0·0·39, CI 0·24, 0·66) and mud block–plaster (OR=0·47, CI 0·25, 0·87) wall types, farming (OR=1·38, CI 1·01, 1·90) and travel to rural areas (OR=0·48, CI 0·26, 0·91) were significantly associated with the use of mosquito control, while controlling for other covariates in the model. History of reported malaria was not associated with the use of mosquito control (OR=1·22, CI 0·79, 1·88). Of the thirteen covariates analysed in the second model, only two household factors were associated with history of malaria: being located in the well-drained stratum (OR=0·49, CI 0·26, 0·96) and being bitten while in the house (OR=1·22, CI 0·19, 0·49). These results suggest that high socioeconomic status is associated with increased household-level mosquito control use, although household-level control may not be enough, as many people are exposed to biting mosquitoes while away from the house and in areas that are more likely to harbour mosquitoes. (shrink)

While in this paper I focus on adoptees, my argument is applicable to donor-conceived children and children of misattributed paternity. I address some of the noted risks of closed adopted and the benefits of open adoption, which is more in keeping with Article 7 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which provides all children with a right to know about their genetic parents and which the Australian government ratified in 1980.

In keeping with the general theme of the General Assembly of CIPSH in Beijing, 2004, in this article I emphasize the potential of the internet to impact the use of works of art in public and private museums for study and research, and for the publication of research. The possibility exists nowadays of creating a hyper-real ‘musée imaginaire’ or ‘museum without walls’ to use André Malraux's phrase of more than fifty years ago. It is hard to see how it could (...) be anything but a benefit to human knowledge to have images of all works in the public domain (that is, for which the creator's copyright has expired) available on the world wide web. Under US law this year (2006) that would mean all works created before 1911. There are encouraging developments in that direction, but there is also constant legal wrangling. And I have to admit there are sometimes two sides to the question, even if I think one argument is far stronger than the other. (shrink)

Impossibility theorems for 2-person and majority continuous games on the unit circle are presented. The emphasis is on simple methods, albeit generating new results, to offer insights into the sophisticated results of theorists in topological social choice.

We make choices about our own appearance and evaluate others' choices – every day. These choices are meaningful for us as individuals and as members of communities. But many features of personal appearance are due to luck, and many cultural beauty standards make some groups and individuals worse off (this is called “lookism”). So, how are we to square these two facets of personal appearance? And how are we to evaluate agency in the context of personal beauty? I identify three (...) ways of responding to these questions: beauty advo- cacy, beauty skepticism, and beauty revisionism. Advocates connect an honorific sense of beauty with personal charac- ter. Skeptics focus on beauty standards, and primarily offer a social critique of beauty standards. Some skeptics suggest embracing other aesthetic ideals – even ugliness. Revision- ists critique beauty standards, but retain an honorific sense of beauty. Each position offers tools to evaluate personal agency as aesthetic agency, whether first-personally or through our appreciation of others' appearance. (shrink)

In this paper, I use interview data drawn from ethnographic work on a Division 1 collegiate cross country team at a large midwestern university in the United States to demonstrate the ways that possessive individualistic discourses around hard work are embodied in classed subjectivities. I find that middle class women, the products of concerted cultivation, tend to focus on the display of hard work, and have anxiety around the value of their production of a hard-working identity. Working class women tend (...) to treat the experience of being disciplined as an athlete as a fortunate opportunity to build physical capital, using the hard work to benefit them as athletes rather than to build their identities. These different attitudes, affected by social class, interact with a dominant discourse around hard work demonstrating the interaction between agency and structure when it comes to forming identities. (shrink)

This paper redirects some of the philosophical discussion of sexual objectification. Rather than contributing further to debates over what constitutes objectification and whether it is harmful, I argue that aesthetic experience is a useful tool for resisting objectification. Attending to our embodied experiences provides immediate evidence that we are subjects; aesthetically attending to that evidence is a way of valuing it. I consider the human body as an aesthetic site, then as an ethico-aesthetic site, and finally as a site of (...) resistance. In addition to deepening accounts of body aesthetic experience, this paper helps frame human bodies as integral to moral agency, rather than impediments to it. (shrink)

This contribution to feminist studies provides a new decoding of the imagery in the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux. I propose layered readings, registering a modern woman's critical perceptions, informed by knowledge of the historical context, to reconstruct the impression these images might have made on the original female owner.

The central task to which contemporary moral philosophers have addressed themselves is that of listing the distinctive characteristics of moral utterances. In this paper I am concerned to propound an entirely negative thesis about these characteristics. It is widely held that it is of the essence of moral valuations that they are universalisable and prescriptive. This is the contention which I wish to deny. I shall proceed by first examining the thesis that moral judgments are necessarily and essentially universalisable and (...) then the thesis that their distinctive function is a prescriptive one. But as the argument proceeds I shall be unable to separate the discussion of the latter thesis from that of the former. (shrink)

"Every word, like a sacred object, has its place. No _précis_ is possible. This extraordinary book must be read."—Edmund Carpenter, _New York Times Book Review _ "No outline is possible; I can only say that reading this book is a most exciting intellectual exercise in which dialectic, wit, and imagination combine to stimulate and provoke at every page."—Edmund Leach, _Man _ "Lévi-Strauss's books are tough: very scholarly, very dense, very rapid in argument. But once you have mastered him, human history (...) can never be the same, nor indeed can one's view of contemporary society. And his latest book, _The Savage Mind_, is his most comprehensive and certainly his most profound. Everyone interested in the history of ideas _must_ read it; everyone interested in human institutions _should _read it."—J. H. Plumb, _Saturday Review_ "A constantly stimulating, informative and suggestive intellectual challenge."—Geoffrey Gorer, _The Observer_, London. (shrink)

Is the possession of taste relevant to the practice of moral and political judgement? For Mary Wollstonecraft and many of her contemporaries, the formation of taste was increasingly significant for both ethics and politics. In fact, some of the key contributors to the debate, which I have termed the ‘politics of taste’, believed that fostering existing standards of taste promised a palliative to modern democratic ills that they diagnosed. Wollstonecraft is an immanent critic of such positions. Although she shares some (...) of Edmund Burke’s and David Hume’s assumptions, she proposes dramatic revision of the extant model of refined taste driven by the spread of rational education. In this way, she attempts to rescue ‘true taste’ from its sentimental context – one permeated by false assumptions about femininity and class. For Wollstonecraft, ‘true taste’ must be the product of refined understanding. Only then can it be deemed a support rather than a hindrance to the practice of moral and political judgement. Although recent Wollstonecraft scholarship has emphasised the depth of her engagement with Scottish Enlightenment thought, using Hume as a primary interlocutor with Wollstonecraft, especially on the question of taste, is yet unprecedented. This approach, Wollstonecraft’s immanent critique of taste, yields arguments about taste that are especially complex and philosophically interesting, both in her time and ours. (shrink)

‘Applied ethics’, as that expression is now used, is a single rubric for a large range of different theoretical and practical activities. Such rubrics function partly as a protective device both within the academic community and outside it; a name of this kind suggests not just a discipline, but a particular type of discipline. In the case of ‘applied ethics’ the suggestive power of the name derives from a particular conception of the relationship of ethics to what goes on under (...) the rubric of ‘applied ethics’. Not everyone who conducts activities under that rubric owes allegiance to this conception and there are doubtless some who would repudiate it as strongly as I do. But it is that dominant conception from which most work in this area derives or aspires to derive its philosophical legitimacy. What is that conception? (shrink)

Los géneros literarios que los críticos han utilizado para calificar la obra de Virginia Woolf, _Orlando_, publicada en 1928, incluyen: la alegoría religiosa, la fábula, la novela policíaca, literatura de doppelgänger, cuentos diabólicos escoceses o la novela gótica. Todavía se discute si es un relato de ciencia ficción. Sin embargo, el tema principal es la identidad sexual del protagonista, quien cruza un “tiempo sin tiempo” y transforma su sexo y sexualidad a lo largo del recorrido de su alma. Este, es (...) un claro rechace a la estructura de las novelas victorianas, en las cuales dominan los personajes masculinos y escasean los femeninos. Orlando nace hombre para luego, con el pasar de los siglos – desde 1600, últimos años de la reina Isabel I, hasta el siglo XX, en el contexto político real de Inglaterra, el de las sufragistas, cuando se da su transformación en mujer y sobre todo en escritora. Pese a lo apenas mencionado, esta novela no es sexista. Unos de sus fines principales es exponer las necesidades de una dama de la época isabelina, los tropiezos masculinos y femeninos de la sociedad victoriana y los obstáculos inherentes a las obsesiones del yo, en que el lenguaje es determinante para la marcación de épocas. Según Virginia, la diferencia sexual viene dada por la educación, pero no pretende fomentar la dualidad hombre-mujer, sino redefinir la feminidad y proclamar a la vez que una mente debe ser andrógina. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:HOW CAN WE LEARN WHAT VER/TATIS SPLENDOR HAS TO TEACH? ALASDAIR MAclNTYRE University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana V-ERITATIS SPLENDOR can be read in two very different ways. It can be read, and of course it should be ad, as a papal encyclical, a piece of authoritative Christian teaching. As such, it is addressed to the Catholic bishops and its subject-matter is not only Christian moral teaching in (...) general, but more particularly the present condition of the academic discipline of moral theology. I of course am neither a bishop nor a theologian, so it might seem that all that I can be asked to do in reading Veritatis Splendor is to listen quietly to what is being said in a conversation between others. Yet the complexity of the experience of reading Veritatis Splendor makes it impossible for me to restrict myself to this role of a more or less innocent bystander. For Veritatis Splendor is not only a work of authoritative Christian teaching about moral judgment and the moral life, it is also a striking contribution by the Polish phenomenological and Thomistic philosopher, Karol Wojtyla, to ongoing philosophical enquiry, one in which an incisive account is advanced of the relationship between biblical and other Christian teaching, the various moralities of the various cultures of humankind and the argumentative conclusions of moral philosophers. (I am well aware that generally several anonymous writers contribute to the drafting of encyclicals, and doubtless they did so on this occasion. But any reader of Karol Wojtyla's major philosophical writings, from his doctoral dissertation onwards, will recognize, both in the style of arguments and in the nuances with which particular arguments are developed, a single nameable authorial 171 172 ALASDAIR MACINTYRE presence in this text.) The central theses of this encyclical thereby challenge a range of rival philosophical accounts of that relationship : Kantian, utilitarian, and Kierkegaardian, to name only the most important. But how can any one text perform both of these very different tasks? Insofar as V eritatis Splendor genuinely contributes to argumentative moral philosophy, must it not be precluded from presenting itself as authoritative teaching? And insofar as it is authoritative Christian teaching, how can it possibly be a contribution to the contentious debates of moral philosophy? Part of what is impressive about Veritatis Splendor is that in the course of answering a number of other questions, it also answers these questions about itself. Even so, any philosophical discussion of this encyclical which finds its argumentative conclusions compelling will be committed to an acknowledgment that philosophy itself, what it is and what it can legitimately hope to achieve, has to be understood in the light afforded by the Christian gospel. Veritatis Splendor never lets us forget this, so that even if I begin from the philosophy in the encyclical, I do so already knowing that it is going to direct me beyond philosophy. Nonetheless this is where I do have to begin, and this for two reasons. First of all this encyclical has an important argumentative structure and arguments are always matter for philosophy. Secondly, quite apart from any concern with Veritatis Splendor itself, what is inescapable for moral philosophers who are also Catholics, such as myself, is a strongly felt need for some definitive answer to the question of how their own peculiar philosophical conclusions about the nature of moral judgment and the moral life are related both to the dominant moral theories and practices of their own culture and to the biblical and Christian teaching by which they have been instructed. Each of these three presses upon us its own type of claim to our attention and allegiance and these sometimes conflicting claims define the situation in which and formed by which each of us encounters the theses and arguments of Veritatis Splendor. What then is my particular situation in these three respects, as Thomistic Aristotelian, as North American immigrant, and as Catholic? VERITATIS SPLENDOR 173 Thomists do of course quarrel a good deal among themselves. But there are two distinctive sets of conclusions which many of us take to be of crucial importance in the practical life. What are they? A first set concerns those rules... (shrink)

Gauss used quadratic forms in his second proof of quadratic reciprocity. In this paper we begin to develop a theory of binary quadratic forms over weak fragments of Peano Arithmetic, with a view to reproducing Gauss’ proof in this setting.

Gauss used quadratic forms in his second proof of quadratic reciprocity. In this paper we begin to develop a theory of binary quadratic forms over weak fragments of Peano Arithmetic, with a view to reproducing Gauss’ proof in this setting.

Edith Stein lived an unconventional life. Born into a devout Jewish family, she drifted into atheism in her mid teens, took up the study of philosophy, studied with Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, became a pioneer in the women's movement in Germany, a military nurse in World War I, converted from atheism to Catholic Christianity, became a Carmelite nun, was murdered at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942, and canonized by Pope John Paul II.

In this second paper of the series we do a local analysis of quadratic forms over completions of a non-standard model of IΔ0+Ω1.

I see model theory as becoming increasingly detached from set theory, and the Tarskian notion of set-theoretic model being no longer central to model theory. In much of modern mathematics, the set-theoretic component is of minor interest, and basic notions are geometric or category-theoretic. In algebraic geometry, schemes or algebraic spaces are the basic notions, with the older “sets of points in affine or projective space” no more than restrictive special cases. The basic notions may be given sheaf-theoretically, or functorially. (...) To understand in depth the historically important affine cases, one does best to work with more general schemes. The resulting relativization and “transfer of structure” is incomparably more flexible and powerful than anything yet known in “set-theoretic model theory”.It seems to me now uncontroversial to see the fine structure of definitions as becoming the central concern of model theory, to the extent that one can easily imagine the subject being called “Definability Theory” in the near future.Tarski's set-theoretic foundational formulations are still favoured by the majority of model-theorists, and evolution towards a more suggestive language has been perplexingly slow. None of the main texts uses in any nontrivial way the language of category theory, far less sheaf theory or topos theory. Given that the most notable interactions of model theory with geometry are in areas of geometry where the language of sheaves is almost indispensable, this is a curious situation, and I find it hard to imagine that it will not change soon, and rapidly. (shrink)

Vaesen and van Amerongen (Philosophical Psychology 21:779-797, 2008) criticize Dennett’s design stance, arguing that as a cognitive thesis about artifact categorization, it is falsified by empirical findings. I assess their criticism in light of both further results and alternate findings the authors acknowledge (but did not discuss in detail). I argue that the design stance still stands in virtue of the conflicting character of these findings, and suggest shifting the domain of empirical scrutiny.

My response to Wartofsky's questions concerning why the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues was rejected and why individualist modes of thought found such ready acceptance is to sketch the kind of historical narrative which I take it must be written if his questions are to be adequately answered. I identify one source of difference between us in the varying extent to which he and I have rejected Marxist modes of thought.

Alasdair MacIntyre and David DeGrazia have explored the question of how sophisticated dolphins’ cognitive abilities are, and these thinkers have taken positions based on a flawed methodology that either assert or imply that dolphins fall below humans when it comes to cognitive sophistication and moral consideration. Timothy Fort uses MacIntyre’s characterization of dolphins in his discussion of the value of biology to business ethics. He thereby makes inaccurate and unsupportable claims, and perpetuates a stereotype about dolphins grounded in (...) unintentional speciesism—a stereotype that makes certain unethical treatment of dolphins appear defensible. There is currently little discussion about the appropriate methodology for studying ethical issues related to the treatment of nonhuman animals in business. This essay aims to encourage such a dialogue by identifying and discussing central weaknesses in the writings of MacIntyre, DeGrazia and Fort and to argue for a more appropriate methodology. (shrink)

This article argues that one of the reasons that the unethical character of much human-dolphin contact is not more apparent to ethicists is that discussion of central issues has been colored with unintentional species bias. This article points out weaknesses in the traditional approach to discussing topics that bear on the question of whether dolphins have moral standing. It demonstrates that discussions of the cognitive abilities of dolphins by Steven Wise and Alasdair MacIntyre are unintentionally but fundamentally anthropocentric-largely because (...) the authors are not familiar with enough of the scientific literature about dolphins to draw the conclusions that they do. (shrink)

The moral pedagogy in the fairy tales is simple but powerful. It is concentrated in the lesson -according to the message of Aristotle- about the finalism sense of action: it makes the child understand that the human answer is an action with sense. Everything in the fairy tale leads to this perspective. Moreover, it exemplifies MacIntyre's opinion which says that current people tend to be proto-aristotelian and to understand their own life and the other's in narrative terms.

Purpose. The paper is aimed to explicate a recently emerging anthropological model of homo eudaimonicus from its secular framework perspective. Theoretical basis. Secularity is considered in three aspects with reference to Taylor’s and Habermas’ ideas: as a common public sphere, as a phenomenological experience of living in a Secular Age, and as a background for happiness to become a major common value among other secular values in the Age of Authenticity. The modifications of happiness interpretation are traced from Early Modernity (...) till nowadays. The preconditions of the contemporary appeal to Aristotle’s eudaimonic theory of happiness are elucidated. The main characteristics of homo economicus anthropological model and reasons for its collapse in the contemporary world are analyzed. Specificities of the contemporary interpretations of eudaimonia are described with reference to the works of MacIntyre, Haybron, Hamilton, Kekes, Melnick, and others. A moral foundation and a behavioral strategy of homo eudaimonicus model are expounded and the role of this model in the life of a contemporary individual person and society is revealed. Originality. For the first time in the Ukrainian philosophical discourse, it is shown how secular ethics enables the rise of a new homo eudaimonicus model within a sphere of secularity; and it is argued that homo eudaimonicus is the result of overcoming the values crisis. It is revealed how homo eudaimonicus along with being descriptive becomes also a normative model of a new effective behavior strategy of a contemporary person facing the current social, economic, political, and environmental challenges. Conclusions. According to the contemporary interpretation, happiness as eudaimonia is a combination of the good life and the meaningful life; it is a human flourishing in this world through the accomplishment of a person’s life plan in the sphere of secularity. Homo eudaimonicus manifests the overcoming of values crisis and the rediscovery of purpose and meaning, this time on the secular basis. Homo eudaimonicus implies the realization of a person’s project of a happy and fulfilling life through moral behavior and socially useful activities. (shrink)

MacIntyre characterises liberal societies as suffering distinctive, structural forms of malaise: they are a ‘disaster’, a ‘moral calamity’, sites of ‘barbarism and darkness’. I argue that, whilst we well understand why MacIntyre thinks liberalism is false, it is unclear why this falsity should imply such moral catastrophe. I begin by motivating the question and distinguishing it from the classic liberal-communitarian debates (§§1-2). In particular, I highlight liberalism’s ability to offer ‘workarounds’, accommodating at least some of MacIntyre’s commitments (...) and so forestalling the prospect of moral disaster. I then introduce two arguments which supply the missing premises, in each case juxtaposing MacIntyre with other critics of liberalism. First, I argue that liberalism’s conception of the private sphere systematically marginalizes MacIntyre’s vision of pedagogy (§3). I compare the argument and the attendant conception of privacy with Adorno’s (§4). In §5, I introduce the second premise: I argue that liberalism espouses a conception of maturity that actively undermines MacIntyre’s model of development, subverting liberal ‘workarounds’. I contrast this claim with recent attacks on liberalism by Deneen. I close with some methodological implications: MacIntyre’s case against liberalism should be seen as a form of external, not immanent, critique. (shrink)

Alasdair MacIntyre is considered one of the most prominent moral philosophers in the contemporary period. Nevertheless, some authors criticize his views on practical rationality as being relativistic. Though there have been authors who have defended MacIntyre through various arguments, none of these authors has referred to one of his later works, namely, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (DRA) for addressing the relativist challenge. The paper aims to fill this lacuna. Thus, the principal question to (...) which the paper responds is: Can the views discussed in DRA contribute toward addressing the relativist challenge raised against MacIntyre? Accordingly, through various arguments, the paper demonstrates that MacIntyre’s views on animal rationality, vulnerability, and dependence as well as those concerning the virtues of care and misericordia as discussed in DRA contribute their mite toward addressing the relativist challenge raised against him. Abstrak Alasdair MacIntyre merupakan salah satu pakar filsafat moral terkemuka di era kontemporer. Namun, beberapa pemikir menuduh konsepnya tentang rasionalitas praktis bersifat relativistis. Meski banyak penulis lain telah berusaha membela posisi MacIntyre, tidak satu pun dari mereka mendasarkan diri pada karya MacIntyre yang lebih mutakhir, y.i. Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (DRA). Makalah ini berusaha untuk mengisi kekosongan tersebut. Maka, pertanyaan utama tulisan ini ialah apakah gagasan-gagasan yang dikembangkan MacIntyre di dalam DRA dapat dipakai untuk menghadapi tuduhan relativisme terhadapnya. Artikel ini hendak menunjukkan bahwa konsep-konsep yang dikemukakan di dalam DRA, seperti “rasionalitas hewani” (animal rationality), kerapuhan, ketergantungan, kepedulian, dan belarasa (misericordia) dapat dipergunakan untuk menangkis tuduhan bahwa MacIntyre jatuh kedalam relativisme. Kata-kata Kunci: Alasdair MacIntyre, rasionalitas praktis, relativismemoral, rasionalitas hewani, kerapuhan, kepedulian. (shrink)