Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (born 1929) is a Scottish philosopher whose mature work, beginning with After Virtue (1981) and developed in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990), and Dependent Rational Animals (1999), has provided contemporary conservatism — particularly its Catholic and traditionalist branches — with its sharpest critique of liberal modernity. MacIntyre is not a self-identified conservative; he describes himself as a Thomist with Marxist origins. But the substantive conclusions of his work — the inadequacy of modern moral individualism, the dependence of practical reason on inherited tradition, the recovery of the virtues — have become foundational reference points for conservative thought.

Key Takeaways

• Scottish-American moral philosopher, author of After Virtue (1981), the most cited work of English-language conservative moral philosophy of the late twentieth century.
• Argues that modern moral discourse uses fragments of an Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition it no longer possesses, producing the “interminable” debates of contemporary ethics.
• Recovery requires returning to a tradition-constituted account of practices, virtues, and the narrative unity of a human life.

History And Context

MacIntyre was born in Glasgow in 1929 to Scottish-Irish parents, took degrees at Queen Mary College London and Manchester, and held positions at Manchester, Leeds, Essex, Brandeis, Boston University, Vanderbilt, Notre Dame, and Duke. His intellectual trajectory is striking. The early work was Marxist (he was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in the 1950s), passed through a sustained engagement with analytic moral philosophy in the 1960s, and reached its mature form after his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1983 and his sustained engagement with Thomism through the Notre Dame years.

The intellectual setting of After Virtue matters. By 1981 Anglo-American moral philosophy was dominated by two camps: Rawlsian deontology and utilitarian consequentialism, both of which proceeded by attempting to derive moral principles from procedures abstracted from any particular tradition. After Virtue opens with the claim that this entire enterprise had failed — that contemporary moral disagreement is interminable because the disputants are using detached fragments of a moral tradition (the Aristotelian-Thomistic) whose framework they have rejected.

The Conservative Position

MacIntyre’s argument has three interlocking parts.

First, the disquieting suggestion at the opening of After Virtue: that we live in a moral catastrophe analogous to a civilisation that has lost the practice of natural science but retained scattered fragments of its vocabulary. Our moral terms — virtue, good, right, justice — survive, but the framework that gave them content has dissolved. This is why moral debate sounds like the exchange of incommensurable assertions.

Second, the recovery of the virtues through a tradition-constituted account. A virtue, MacIntyre argues, is a quality of character whose exercise enables a person to achieve goods internal to a practice, sustains the narrative unity of a life, and contributes to the tradition’s pursuit of the human good. This account requires three concepts the moderns have abandoned: the practice (a coherent socially established cooperative activity with internal goods), the narrative unity of a life (a person is the unity of his story, not a series of preference-satisfactions), and the tradition (an ongoing argument about the goods of a way of life).

Third, the dependence of practical reason on tradition. Rationality, MacIntyre argues in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, is always tradition-constituted. There is no view from nowhere from which to adjudicate between Aristotle, Augustine, Hume, and Nietzsche. The choice between rival traditions is itself made within a tradition’s frame. The Enlightenment project of finding tradition-independent reason was, on this account, a particular tradition’s failure to recognise itself as such.

The political consequence — drawn most explicitly in the closing pages of After Virtue and in Dependent Rational Animals — is that moral life requires forms of community in which traditions of practice can be transmitted: families, parishes, schools, professional guilds, neighbourhoods. The contemporary nation-state, organised around managerial expertise and contractual exchange, is poorly equipped to sustain them. MacIntyre’s call for “another, doubtless very different, St Benedict” who could form local communities capable of carrying the moral life through a new dark age has been the founding text of the contemporary “Benedict Option” debate.

Differing Positions

Liberal political philosophers, particularly in the analytic tradition, have argued that MacIntyre’s account of tradition-constituted rationality collapses into relativism — that he has no principled way of choosing between, say, the Aristotelian and Nietzschean traditions. MacIntyre’s reply, developed in Three Rival Versions, is that traditions are rationally evaluable by their capacity to give an account of their own development, to encounter and incorporate rival traditions’ best insights, and to resolve the epistemic crises they generate.

Catholic theologians sympathetic to Thomism have welcomed MacIntyre’s recovery but argued that his philosophical Aristotelianism understates the role of revealed theology in Aquinas. The Radical Orthodoxy school has pressed this critique most consistently.

Conservative critics of MacIntyre’s continuing Marxist sympathies have noted his unease with markets and his attraction to forms of communal economy that resemble medieval guild structures more than modern capitalism. MacIntyre treats this as a feature, not a bug; his conservatism, if that is the word, is genuinely pre-modern.