The Ethics of Authenticity: An Aspiration That Alienates Us from Virtue

In this essay I identify numerous internal problems with the ethics of authenticity and conclude that it is an aspiration that alienates us from the virtues. I focus on Charles Taylor’s well-known articulation of the ethics of authenticity and show how it avoids some of the criticisms Alasdair MacIntyre has leveled against Bernard Williams’s version of the ethics of authenticity. I then raise several substantive objections against Taylor’s position, arguing that it faces serious difficulties both in his problematic account of the presuppositions of ethical authenticity and in the inherent liabilities of ethical authenticity to degenerate into the very subjectivism and atomistic individualism Taylor rightly demurs. I finish with some suggestions of how authenticity, like pleasure, can be rightly situated within a neo-Aristotelian account of virtuous flourishing.