The major intellectual and moral preoccupations of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who died this week at the age of 96, speak to key issues of modernity and morality that leftists will be grappling with for a long time.
Nick French: Alasdair MacIntyre Leaves a Legacy to Wrestle With
lasdair MacIntyre, the preeminent moral philosopher known for his critiques of liberal modernity, died yesterday at the age of ninety-six. Born in Glasgow in 1929 and teaching for the last several decades of his life in the United States, he traversed an idiosyncratic intellectual path. MacIntyre joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, then moving onto Trotskyist organizations the Socialist Labour League and International Socialists, he eventually became a prominent member of the British New Left in the 1960s.
MacIntyre’s early intellectual output grappled seriously with Marxism. But he moved away from that tradition in the 1970s. In 1981, he published perhaps his most famous work, the ambitious After Virtue, which introduced the main themes that would take up the rest of his career.
The central argument of After Virtue was that the Enlightenment, with its sweeping away of notions of the human telos and divine law rooted, respectively, in Aristotelian metaphysics and Christian doctrine, undermined the possibility of a rational basis for morality. Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophers, most notably Immanuel Kant and the British utilitarians, made heroic efforts to construct secular rational justifications of moral concepts of good and evil, right and wrong. But these justifications all failed and were doomed to fail, MacIntyre argues, because no such basis can be provided in the absence of the metaphysical and theological commitments that modern philosophers rejected.
The result is that we in contemporary liberal societies have no shared framework for justifying moral claims or resolving disagreements. Although we continue to engage in moral discourse about justice, rights, obligations, and so on, these are just linguistic holdovers from a pre-Enlightenment world where that language had a determinate meaning.
When we decry an action as “morally wrong” or “unjust,” MacIntyre contends, this is just a disguised way of voicing our own arbitrary preferences. In fact, all of social life now centers around the pursuit of individual preference, whether organized through the market or (perhaps just as deviously, for the erstwhile Trotskyist) through bureaucratic institutions. This situation is destructive to social solidarity and the very possibility of human flourishing.
MacIntyre worked to develop a response to this dark predicament in his follow-up, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, and the rest of his intellectual life. Through wide-ranging engagements with philosophy, history, and literature, he proposed a return to a kind of Thomistic-Aristotelian understanding of human nature. (MacIntyre himself was a convert to Catholicism.) The core idea is that human beings can flourish only in communities that recognize and enable the realization of certain kinds of goods — like chess, say, or teaching, or fishing, or the goods of friendship and family life — that have their own, tradition-based internal standards of evaluation….
https://jacobin.com/2025/05/alasdair-macintyre-modernity-morality-obituary
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Provocative philosopher who argued that current morality has been cut off from its roots ‘largely thanks to the Enlightenment’
In 1981, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who has died aged 96, tore up the work he was then writing on ethics, and produced what became his best known book, After Virtue. In it, he excoriated current moral philosophy and, indeed, current morality itself, complaining that morality has been cut off from its roots in tradition, and, “largely thanks to the Enlightenment project”, has ceased to be coherent.
No longer anchored in the Aristotelian notion that humans have a goal and function, or offering an account of how these are to be fulfilled, it divorces values from facts. Although calling a person, practice or action “good” or “bad” seemingly appeals to “an objective and impersonal standard”, said MacIntyre, there is none available. As he had already lamented in Against the Self-Images of the Age (1971), Christianity, Marxism and psychoanalysis have failed to provide an adequate communal ideology.
Describing himself as “a revolutionary Aristotelian”, he was also an enthusiast for the ethics of Aristotle’s medieval follower, Thomas Aquinas. “Forward to the 13th century,” was the motto jokingly attributed to him. But by reviving the sort of ethics that identifies “the good” with human flourishing, MacIntyre aimed to lead us out of “the new dark ages”, presumably into a better future. He influenced the resurgence of virtue ethics and communitarianism (he denied espousing either), and the now fashionable distrust of liberalism, individualism and the Enlightenment.
Remarkable for the number of conflicting beliefs that he could, often simultaneously, embrace, he was both Protestant and Marxist in the 1960s, then rejected both creeds, and, in the 80s, became a Catholic; but he always retained his Marxist disgust at capitalism and at the alienation of modernity.
MacIntyre was 52 when he wrote After Virtue. In A Short History of Ethics (1966), he had already berated contemporary analytic philosophy for examining and interpreting moral concepts “apart from their history”, and portrayed how “moral concepts change as social life changes” – from the Homeric era when to be agathos (the ideal for well-born men) was to be kingly, courageous and clever; through Aristotelian and Christian virtues, which also attuned ethics to an (albeit different) notion of essential human nature; through the Enlightenment’s uprooting insistence on autonomous reason; to 20th-century emotivism, which makes ethics merely an expression of personal preference.
In the late 70s, MacIntyre read the physicist Thomas Kuhn, who regarded scientific change as a series of “paradigm shifts” rather than a line of progress, and this gave him, if not a Damascene conversion, then a clinching certainty as to what was so grotesque about 20th-century morality: rather than being settled in a particular ethical paradigm, we operate simultaneously or alternately with several incommensurable moral traditions. “Imagine,” runs the opening of After Virtue, “that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe”, that science and science teaching have been deliberately abolished, and only charred pages, disconnected scientific terms and meaningless incantations remain.
This, said MacIntyre, is our current moral situation. Like the 18th-century Polynesians who talked of “taboos” to Captain Cook but were unable to say what they meant by that term, all we have are “the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance is derived”. This is why we regard moral argument as “necessarily interminable”; we do not even expect to reach consensus. Should we prioritise human rights and/or the general happiness, individual choice and/or the general will, hedonism and will-to-power and/or compassion and self-abnegation?
Aristotle’s ethics in the 4th century BC had assumed that humans have a telos (function) as rational animals, said MacIntyre. Theistic beliefs – Jewish, Christian and Muslim – complicated, without essentially altering, the three-fold ethical scheme: designed to move us from “human-nature-as-it-happens-to be” via moral education and moral principles to “human-nature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realised-its-telos”. Eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers, however, in aiming to liberate us from superstition and authority, and to find a purely rational basis for ethics, had stripped the self of social identity and values of any claim to factual status.
Thus morality became a set of inordinate commands and, ultimately, mere “private arbitrariness”. The unembedded self – essentially “nothing” – is now obliged to choose its own values….
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/25/alasdair-macintyre-obituary
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