David McPherson's Virtue and Meaning: A Neo-Aristotelian Approach (= V&M) invites Neo-Aristotelians to contemplate what their enquiries in ethics and philosophical anthropology have overlooked. He claims that the dominant Neo-Aristotelian approach subscribes to a disenchanted outlook that fails to capture the quest for meaningfulness that is distinctive of the human form of life as the meaning-seeking animal. What disenchanted Neo-Aristotelianism misses is our need as meaning-seeking animals to find (a) meaning in life, (b) a meaningful life, and (c) the meaning of life. To redress this oversight McPherson draws on the work of Charles Taylor and others to articulate a re-enchanted Neo-Aristotelian perspective (3–4). To be clear, ‘seeking re-enchantment does not mean a return to a pre-modern worldview’ (3). It involves ‘discovering (or recovering) something that is already there to be discovered in the world: namely, non-arbitrary, non-projective normative demands’ (4). These three issues about meaning frame the five chapters of M&V and its aim to articulate a re-enchanted Neo-Aristotelian approach to the human form of life.

Chapter 1's recovery project introduces ‘strong evaluative meanings’ (= SEM) as ‘desire-independent normative standard[s]’ (33) that are required to secure (a) meaning in life. A ‘strong evaluative meaning . . . involves a special sense of obligation containing a “peculiar” or “mesmeric” force, that is, it places demands upon us’ (40). Chapter 2 deploys SEMs to ‘re-enchant our conception of happiness’ (194). McPherson argues that happiness (eudaimonia) is to be ‘understood as a normatively higher, nobler, more meaningful mode of life’ (53). So not only do virtuous activities in pursuit of SEMs constitute happiness, but happiness itself is ‘understood as [having] a meaningful life’ (47). Virtue, happiness, and strong meanings hang together and all three are exigent for living (b) a meaningful life. Chapter 3 argues that the constitutive or strong goods comprising SEMs include both the strong goods concerning our own happiness and those concerning others: humans and other animals, the environment, and God (41–42). What SEM discloses is that ‘human beings are intrinsically worthy of concern for their own sake’ (80). There is something sacred about humans that endows them with dignity and justifies certain moral absolutes as well as the inherent meaningfulness of all human life – ethical claims McPherson contends the dominant disenchanted Neo-Aristotelians are unable to explain (80–81).

Chapter 4 argues that the SEMs constituting (a) meaning in life and (b) a meaningful life must be ontologically grounded within a cosmic outlook concerning (c) the meaning of life. Quietism about our moral moorings is unacceptable. McPherson responds to Bernard Williams's challenge that Aristotle's cosmic outlook was mistaken and it is a muddle to think our ethical stands require a ‘cosmic or ultimate source of meaning to which we must align our lives’ (115). McPherson argues that Hursthouse's and McDowell's responses to Williams are inadequate, then contends that science is not as uniformly pessimistic about teleology as Williams assumes. For some scientists ‘the universe (i.e., the laws of nature, the constants of physics, and the initial conditions of the universe) appears to be fine-tuned for the emergence of life and consciousness and ultimately for intelligible beings such as ourselves’ (137). There are theistic and non-theistic explanations for this ‘cosmic or ultimate source of meaning for human life by which we can find our place in the cosmos’ (142). However, theism alone can hold that the cosmos itself expresses the personal moral intentions of God (136–140).

Chapter 5 concludes with an account of the human being as homo religiosus, which is adumbrated within McPherson's percipient reflections on the place of spirituality within our lives and his marvellous account of the two forms of contemplation we ought to take leisure to engage in restfully if we are fruitfully to examine, admire, and live out the three facets of a meaningful life. There is much to ponder in this chapter's articulation of existential gratitude and theistic spirituality, and we should be grateful to McPherson for this pearl.

McPherson's V&M helps us Neo-Aristotelians understand better the urgent questions and substantive challenges we must address if our stands in ethics and philosophical anthropology are to be vindicated. As a fellow Neo-Aristotelian, I shall register some friendly but critical points concerning McPherson's Neo-Aristotelian approach by focusing on the SEMs central to V&M's arguments for the superiority of its approach over rival Neo-Aristotelian approaches. I begin with a synopsis of McPherson's Neo-Aristotelian approaches and SEMs.

McPherson distinguishes three Neo-Aristotelian approaches to ethics: ethical naturalism (n-A1), naturalism of second nature (n-A2), and McPherson's ethics of strong evaluative meanings (n-A3). McPherson criticizes n-A1 for its disenchanted and ‘quasi-scientific approach to ethics’, which focuses on a ‘third-personal, observational, or disengaged standpoint’ (10–11). The point of departure for n-A1s (which includes Philippa Foot, Rosalind Hursthouse, and Alasdair MacIntyre) is Elizabeth Anscombe's clarion call in ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ to jettison the ersatz ‘moral ought’ that is a survival from an earlier theistic world-view, and which cannot exist in the totally disenchanted world of non-theists. While McPherson introduces numerous caveats to Anscombe's own view – she is a theist, recognizes human dignity and ethical objectivity, and rejects the ‘total disenchantment’ canard that we cannot derive an ought from an is – he nevertheless claims ‘that Anscombe is making a disenchanting move in suggesting that we should abandon – at least if we aren't theists – a special “moral” sense of “ought” that is supposed to contain some sort of “peculiar” or “mesmeric” force’ (8). This disenchanting move leads n-A1s to overlook the SEMs McPherson claims we need to secure (a) meaning in life. A mediating re-enchanting step is supplied by John McDowell, the principal exponent of n-A2, i.e. the Neo-Aristotelian second-nature approach. Unlike n-A1s, ‘McDowell does a better job of avoiding the scientism that is prevalent in modern intellectual life’ (40; 25). This is because McDowell dons the ‘first-personal, participative, or engaged standpoint’. For n-A1s, we just observe human moral life from the outside; n-A1s adopt an ethologist's perspective – not an ethnologist's – which only notices the ways humans flourish analogously to the flourishing or defective behaviours of other social animals. What this naturalistic approach entirely misses is precisely what n-A2's ‘naturalism of second nature’ discloses, namely, the human form of life from within the ‘space of reasons’ and the ways we are educated into and inherit a tradition of objective ethical norms. But n-A2's re-enchantment doesn't go far enough; what is required by McPherson's lights is re-enchanting the space of reasons to be a ‘space of meanings’ comprised of SEMs.

McPherson identifies two features of SEMs. First, they are categorical: strong goods like the noble, dignity, and virtues are ‘normative for our desires’ whether or not we recognize them. Failure to respond to this normative force is a sign of ‘being ethically deficient’. Second, strong goods are incommensurable with weak goods which might be desired (e.g. ‘a particular flavor of ice cream’) but don't make the normative demands of strong goods because they aren't of ‘incomparably higher worth’. McPherson argues that n-A1s have failed to explain moral absolutes – e.g. prohibitions of murder and torture – because their disenchanting move ‘to do away with a special moral ought’ excludes the very SEMs required to explain moral absolutes (31–33). McPherson's critique focuses on MacIntyre as providing ‘the strongest account of other-regarding virtues’ (80), which nevertheless fails without SEMs.

My first issue concerns McPherson's frequent refrain that other Neo-Aristotelians have overlooked what orbits SEMs. What is not considered is that Neo-Aristotelians might contend that SEMs and other Taylorian theses are either idiomatically or substantively at odds with Neo-Aristotelian conceptions of human nature, virtues, eudaimonia, and common goods. I believe this is in fact the case. Indeed, McPherson doesn't address the common good or natural law precepts, which for MacIntyre form the core of both his account of unconditional precepts and his rejection of arbitrary and frequently incompatible human rights/dignity claims (Dependent Rational Animals = DRA (1999), ‘Moral Dilemmas’, and Tanner Lectures on lying in Mill and Kant). So McPherson neither addresses MacIntyre's Thomist-Aristotelianism nor his contention that an Aristotelian common good conception of justice is a rival (DRA, 159–160; 119) to the ‘other-regarding’ morality that McPherson misconstrues MacIntyre as defending (83).

Second, McPherson's demarcation of Neo-Aristotelian approaches should raise eyebrows. The criteria provided for uniting n-A1's ‘third-personal, observational, or disengaged standpoint’ contrasted with n-A2's ‘first-personal, participative, or engaged standpoint’ (10) obfuscate rather than accurately characterize the similarities and dissimilarities among Anscombe, Foot, Hursthouse, MacIntyre, and McDowell. Additionally, as M&V's footnotes and frequent caveats betray, even McPherson is forced to acknowledge that all members of n-A1 hold some starkly contrasting views, some of which are exceptions to McPherson's criteria. Consider MacIntyre, who, like Taylor, defends a narrative account of personal identity, one which stresses taking seriously both first and third person perspectives on our reasons for action (Ethics and the Conflicts of Modernity = ECM (2016): 33–34, 41–61, 72–76, 89, 157–165, 207–224, 231–244; DRA, chs 8–13). This is first a practical everyday concern before it becomes a theoretical one (ECM, 62–63). MacIntyre's account is on display in his numerous detailed engagements with Frankfurt, Sokolowski, McDowell, Williams, as well as his narrative reflections on the first personal desires, practical reasoning, and some conversions in the lives of Edith Stein, Georg Lukacs, Vasily Grossman, C. L. R. James, Sandra Day O'Connor, and Denis Faul.

So MacIntyre – no less than Taylor, McDowell, and McPherson – unequivocally endorses the criteria for n-A2, which McPherson contends n-A1s like MacIntyre overlook. This is why McPherson's classifications conflict with more plausible ones like Talbot Brewer's. Brewer unites MacIntyre and Anscombe insofar as they emphasize the practical life of virtue as distinct from and the source for theoretical enquiry and justification, in contrast to Hursthouse and others who conceive ‘virtue ethics’ as another theoretical position poised to solve an academic debate about ‘morality’. McPherson's classifications also obscure how he'd classify the other Neo-Aristotelians he cites. Are Geach, Thompson, Lott, Vogler, Frey, and Brewer all naturalistic n-A1s? I fear McPherson's implausible classifications may unintentionally make adversaries out of Neo-Aristotelian allies otherwise amicable to his approach's insights.

Third, fundamental questions remain about SEMs. What criteria, if any, anchor SEMs in human nature and teleology? Are they normative ends which we value as goods because they actually perfect our nature? If not, then SEMs seem unhinged from nature and are open to Anscombe's criticisms of the ‘moral ought’. Furthermore, if virtues make us conducive to SEMs’ categorical normative demands, and, as McPherson claims, there is ‘a plurality of strong goods . . . and . . . they can come into conflict’ (67), then SEMs seem to entail an anti-Aristotelian rejection of the unity of the virtues, for conflicting virtues and strong goods make competing categorical demands upon us. This entailment, however, bucks against McPherson's response to Williams's challenge that human nature is a mixed bag (116–124).

Finally, I do think McPherson is correct that most Neo-Aristotelians rarely attend directly to those horizons of significance or existential world-views which Jonathan Lear and Charles Taylor have perspicaciously explored. But it's a misdiagnosis to say that n-A1s overlook them due to an exclusively observational approach, since some make neither error. A better diagnosis points to the limitations of Aristotle's distinction between practical and theoretical reasoning, which doesn't make clear what form of reasoning – especially needed in a secular age – constitutes the examination or disputation of one's basic existential outlook. Herein lies the importance of McPherson's treatment of ‘Spirituality [which] is not just practical; it is a practical life-orientation’ (152). Contemplative spirituality fills this Aristotelian lacuna, for it is, as McPherson details, ‘a practical life-orientation that is shaped by what is taken to be a self-transcending source of meaning which involves strong normative demands’ (153). On this score in particular McPherson has made a fruitful contribution to our Neo-Aristotelian enquiries.