Alasdair 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…
Auteur: Nick French
