When confronted with competing path

Alasdair MacIntyre en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alasdair_MacIntyre offers a powerful answer to this question. In his book “After Virtue (1981)” he gives an account of the way we, as moral agents, arrive at our purposes and ends. As an alternative to the voluntarist conception of the person, MacIntyre advances a narrative conception. Human beings are storytelling telling beings. We live our lives as narrative quests. “I can only answer the question “What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question “Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?”

All lived narratives, MacIntyre observes, have a certain teleological character. This does not mean they have fixed purpose or end laid down by some external authority. Teleology and unpredictability coexist. “Like characters in a fictional narrative we do not know what will happen next, but none the less our lives have a certain form when projects itself toward our future.”

To live a life is to enact a narrative quest that aspires to a certain unity or coherence. When confronted with competing paths, I try to figure out which path will best make sense of my life as a whole, and of the things I care about. Moral deliberation is more about interpreting my life story than exerting my will. In involves choice, but the choice issues from the interpretation; it is not a sovereign act of will. At any given moment, others may see more clearly than I do which path, of the ones before me, fits best with the arc of my life; upon reflection, I may say that my friend knows me better than I know myself. The narrative account of moral agency has the virtue of allowing for this possibility

It also shows how moral deliberation involves reflection within and about the larger life stories of which my life is a part. As MacIntyre writes, “I am never able to seek the good or exercise the virtues only ‘qua’ individual.” I can make sense of the narrative of my life only by coming to terms with the stories in which I find myself. For MacIntyre (as for Aristotle), the narrative, or teleological, aspect of moral reflection is bound up with membership and belonging.

“We all approach our own circumstances as bearers of a particular social identity. I am someone’s son or daughter, someone’s cousin or uncle; I am a citizen of this or that city, a member of this or that guild or profession; I belong to this clan, that tribe, this nation. Hence what is goof for me has to be the good for one who inhabits these roles. As such, I inherit from the past of my family, my city, my tribe, my nation, I variety of debts, inheritances, rightful expectations and obligations. These constitute the given in my life, my moral starting point. This is in part what gives my own life its moral particularity.”