Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue
Alasdair MacIntyre opens After Virtue with a striking diagnosis of the moral condition of modern Western society. He argues that the moral vocabularies we now use are fragments of once coherent moral languages, and that the coherence has been lost. What remains are emotive assertions and rival slogans, not reasoned arguments grounded in a shared account of human flourishing. MacIntyre calls the dominant mood emotivism: moral judgments are treated as expressions of preference or attitude rather than claims that can be rationally defended. As a result, public moral debate is a series of incompatible assertions that cannot be settled by argument because participants no longer share the basic moral framework or the account of human nature that would make reasons persuasive.
To explain how we reached this state, MacIntyre tells a condensed history of ethical thought. He traces a slow decay that begins with the collapse of a classical, teleological moral order in which the virtues were intelligible because they were tied to an account of the human good. In classical Greek and medieval Christian moral thinking, virtues made sense within a story about what a human life is for. When that grand narrative broke down, subsequent moral theories tried to conserve parts of the old language but could not restore the old coherence. Enlightenment moral philosophies, utilitarianism, Kantian formalism, and the various modern moral projects all attempted systematic replacements, but MacIntyre maintains that each ultimately presupposes some moral grammar it cannot supply.
The book gives special attention to the modern condition of moral disagreement. MacIntyre shows how disagreements that once could be resolved by appeal to a shared conception of human telos now devolve into rhetoric, power struggles, and rival emotive commitments. He uses examples from political debate and legal argument to show how interlocutors talk past each other, invoking terms like justice, rights, fairness without a common standard that defines what those terms aim at. The consequence is that moral discourse becomes procedural and managerial, reduced to tactic and strategy, with little capacity for moral education or formation.
Moving from critique to constructive work, MacIntyre reintroduces the concept of virtue, but he does so in a way that ties virtues to social practices and to narrative identity. A practice, in his vocabulary, is any coherent, complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which internal goods are realized. Examples include the arts, sciences, crafts, and certain social institutions. Practices have standards of excellence internal to them, and mastering a practice requires learning and exercising virtues that sustain the practice. For example, the internal goods of medicine or of musical composition are distinct from the external goods that attach to them, such as money, status, or power. Virtues enable practitioners to pursue internal goods despite the pressure of external goods. Thus honesty, courage, perseverance, and justice are not merely private feelings or social conventions; they are qualities that make possible the achievement of excellence within practices.
Closely connected to practices is the idea of the narrative unity of a human life. MacIntyre insists that to answer the question what it is good for a person to do, one must understand the life of the person as a story with a plot and an end. A virtue is a quality that helps a person sustain the kind of life whose narrative arc aims at certain goods. Virtues therefore cannot be abstract rules or isolated dispositions. They presuppose roles, relationships, and aims that are storied and historically located. Moral evaluation thus requires a notion of human flourishing that is richer than isolated acts judged by rules or outcomes.
MacIntyre also argues that moral reasoning is tradition dependent. Traditions are coherent histories of seeking the truth about human life, practices, and institutions. They supply the standards and concepts by which moral reasoning proceeds. Reasoned debates between rival traditions are possible, but they take place within the framework of a traditioned inquiry that supplies the questions, the criteria, and the judgments. If modern public discourse has no shared tradition, then moral argument will lack the grounding needed for rational persuasion. For this reason MacIntyre is skeptical of attempts to build a neutral, tradition independent moral philosophy.
Institutions play an ambiguous role in his picture. Institutions sustain practices by providing material resources and social frameworks, but they are easily corrupted by the pursuit of external goods. When institutions prioritize wealth, power, or prestige, they can undermine the very practices they are supposed to serve. Thus the institutional life of a society is decisive for whether virtues flourish or wither.
At the heart of MacIntyre’s constructive proposal is a revival of an Aristotelian account of virtue, supplemented and deepened by medieval Christian thought, especially Thomism. He does not call simply for the restoration of ancient formulas. Rather he proposes that we reclaim the conceptual resources of a teleological moral framework in which human goods are integrally related to practices, character, and community. This implies that moral formation must take place within communities that embody and teach a particular moral narrative. For MacIntyre, small, traditioned communities are the primary loci where virtues can be learned and where practices can be sustained against the corrosive forces of modern institutions and market pressures.
MacIntyre is also stark about politics. He warns that liberal individualism and managerial bureaucracy will not secure a moral life; political arrangements must be judged by their capacity to enable practices and to cultivate the virtues necessary for human flourishing. The book therefore hints at an alternative civic order in which local communities and institutions shape citizens’ moral formation. MacIntyre is sometimes criticized for the perceived conservatism of this vision. He answers that only by reclaiming a substantive moral anthropology can we recover the standards needed to judge practices, institutions, and public policies.
After Virtue is at once a diagnosis, a genealogy, and a polemic. It diagnoses the fragmented state of modern moral discourse, gives a genealogy of the cultural forces and philosophical choices that produced the fragmentation, and argues passionately for a recovery of virtue understood within a teleological, traditioned framework. The book had profound influence in moral philosophy because it redirected attention from abstract moral theory to questions about practices, character, and the social contexts of moral life. It challenges readers to take moral education and the shaping role of communities seriously, and to ask how a moral language that makes sense might again be cultivated.
In sum, MacIntyre tells us that we live in an age after virtue because we lack the narrative frameworks and social formations that once made virtues intelligible. The remedy he offers is not a quick fix but a reorientation: to rebuild moral understanding by attending to practices, reviving the virtues those practices require, and embedding moral formation in communities and traditions that guide aims and reasons.