Practice of Queueing as a Categorical Imperative for a Fair Society

Abstract

Alisdair MacIntyre argues that there are three stages of moral philosophical perspective for an individual. These are, the individual (1) being on a life-long quest towards a telos between birth and death, (2) who arrives in an inherited historical and social identity that is only partially constituted and (3) needs to exercise relevant virtues in one’s life. Departing from these three moral stages I build on Alasadair MacIntyre’s narrative in After Virtue with the purpose of focusing and highlighting one specific human practice. This practice is the practice of queueing and in this article I argue that it functions as a signpost for whether fear treatment is a shared societal practice that also must hinge on what MacIntyre labels to be an intelligible action. On his turn MacIntyre is known to criticize modernity, individualism as lacking morality making human survival beyond despair. MacIntyre perceives virtues as philosophical values and foresees that the collapse of a virtuous life is an inherent derivative of an unintelligible and unfair society. This article aims to demonstrate that queueing is an intelligible human action that is to be labelled as virtuous social order and a form of distribution of justice.