Alasdair MacIntyre

1929-present · Scottish-American · Ethics, Virtue Ethics, Political Philosophy, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Moral Theology

This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.

Born in Glasgow in 1929, Alasdair MacIntyre began his intellectual life as a Marxist, editing journals alongside E. P. Thompson in the British New Left. The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 forced the central question of his career: on what rational basis could one condemn Stalinism? Neither liberal individualism nor existentialism could answer it. The search drove him through the philosophy of social science and eventually to Aristotle, Aquinas, and Catholicism.

Topics Alasdair MacIntyre addresses

• emotivism as cultural condition
• the failure of the Enlightenment project
• practice (in MacIntyre's technical sense)
• internal vs external goods
• the narrative unity of a human life
• tradition-constituted rationality
• Nietzsche or Aristotle?
• virtue as acquired human quality
• the dependent rational animal
• the new dark ages and waiting for another St. Benedict
• the encyclopaedia/genealogy/tradition trichotomy
• the disquieting suggestion
• the virtues in heroic societies
• the virtues at Athens
• justice as a virtue
• the nature of the virtues
• the unity of a human life and the concept of a tradition
• medieval aspects and occasions
• from the virtues to virtue and after virtue
• liberalism and the politics of community
• the manager, the therapist, and the aesthete
• action versus behavior
• MacIntyre and Marxism
• moral fragments and incommensurability

Questions to put to Alasdair MacIntyre

The Failure of the Enlightenment Project

• What do you mean when you say modern moral discourse is in a state of catastrophic disorder?
• How did Kant, Mill, and Hume each fail to justify morality on their own terms?
• Why do you say emotivism is a poor theory but an accurate description of our culture?
• What's the difference between emotivism as a philosophical theory and emotivism as a social condition?
• How do the manager, the therapist, and the aesthete embody the emotivist culture?

Practices and Internal Goods

• What do you mean by a practice in your technical sense?
• What's the difference between internal and external goods?
• How do external goods tend to corrupt practices in modernity?
• Why does the chess-playing child example matter so much to your argument?
• Can you give me examples of practices that sustain the virtues today?
• What makes a practice coherent rather than just any cooperative activity?

Narrative Unity and the Virtues

• What do you mean by the narrative unity of a human life?
• How are the three tiers of virtue definition related to each other?
• Why does the question 'what is the good life for me?' require a narrative answer?
• Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?
• How do the virtues sustain a tradition as well as a practice?

Tradition-Constituted Rationality

• What do you mean when you say rationality is tradition-constituted?
• How does a tradition progress or decay?
• What is an epistemological crisis and how does a tradition resolve one?
• Doesn't your view make moral inquiry relativist with no way to judge between traditions?
• How can the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition comprehend its rivals in ways they cannot comprehend themselves?

Nietzsche or Aristotle

• Why do you say the choice is between Nietzsche and Aristotle?
• What did Nietzsche correctly diagnose about the Enlightenment project?
• How is the will to power what's left when moral discourse is reduced to preference?
• Why couldn't the Enlightenment project succeed after abandoning the Aristotelian framework of telos and function?
• What makes the recovery of Aristotelian virtue ethics the rational alternative to Nietzsche's nihilism?

Politics After Virtue and the New Dark Ages

• What do you mean by 'liberalism' when you criticize it?
• How are contemporary American conservatives and liberals both versions of the same liberal individualism?
• What survives of Marx's critique of capitalism and what doesn't?
• Why do you say we're waiting for another St. Benedict rather than political revolution?
• What would local forms of community sustaining the virtues actually look like today?
• How do the modern state and corporation destroy the practices that sustain human flourishing?

Converse with Alasdair MacIntyre on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Alasdair MacIntyre's own writing, cited to the page.