person1950s-present

Alasdair MacIntyre

Disciplines:

Summary

Scottish philosopher who revitalized virtue ethics with After Virtue — a sweeping critique of Enlightenment moral philosophy arguing that modern ethics has lost the teleological framework that made moral discourse coherent.

Core Contribution

After Virtue: the Enlightenment project of justifying morality rationally failed because it abandoned the Aristotelian framework of function and teleology. Emotivism (the dominant modern view) is the inevitable consequence of this failure. Only a return to Aristotelian virtue ethics can restore coherent moral discourse. Tradition-constituted rationality: rationality is always embedded in a tradition — there is no view from nowhere. Whose Justice? Which Rationality?: traditions provide their own criteria of rational assessment.

Key Spikes & Highlights

After Virtue opens with the fiction of a catastrophe in which science has been destroyed — people retain the vocabulary of science but have lost the context that gave it meaning. MacIntyre argues this is what actually happened to ethics after the Enlightenment.
Converted from Marxism to Aristotelianism to Thomistic Catholicism over his career — each shift driven by philosophical argument about what tradition can best sustain rational inquiry.
Whose Justice? argues that Rawlsian liberalism is itself a tradition, not a view from nowhere — it privileges certain values (individual autonomy, procedure over substance) that are not neutral but reflect a specific historical inheritance.

Notable Works & Achievements

After Virtue

Whose Justice? Which Rationality?

Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry

Dependent Rational Animals

Historical Influences

Aristotle Thomas Aquinas G.W.F. Hegel

Intellectual Lineage

Aristotelianism Thomism

Contemporaries & Peers

John Rawls Charles Taylor

Minds Influenced

Virtue Ethics Communitarian Political Philosophy

Intellectual Posterity

Virtue Ethics Revival Communitarian Critique of Liberalism

Discussing