Abstract

I examine the role of tragedy within the ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre and Iris Murdoch. MacIntyre argues for a narrative conception of the self, stressing the need for coherence and intelligibility and for the virtues which promote them. Tragic dilemma presents a successful self with severe frustration but not with destruction of its overall project. Murdoch, on the other hand, holds little hope for the self's coherence, and in fact champions tragic art's capacity for disturbing and even disrupting the self's fantasies of control and coherence. Her virtues correspondingly help the agent to confront the tragic realities of life. I suggest one way to bring these two accounts, of tragedy and the virtues, together: by considering tragic experience in the context of moral pedagogy