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Alasdair MacIntyre (1929–)

MacIntyre argued that the Enlightenment project of grounding morality in universal reason has failed — and that the failure is not contingent but structural. There is no standpoint outside all traditions from which moral claims can be justified. Rationality itself is tradition-constituted: standards of rational inquiry, criteria for what counts as evidence, and the very terms in which problems are formulated are internal to the tradition in which they arise. The consequence is a plurality of moral traditions, each internally rational, none reducible to a common standard — and the question of how traditions that are incommensurable can nevertheless learn from one another becomes the central problem. After Virtue (1981) is the diagnosis; Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990) develop the constructive account.

Life

Born 12 January 1929 in Glasgow, Scotland. Educated at Queen Mary College, University of London (BA), and the University of Manchester (MA). Taught at the University of Leeds, the University of Essex, and the University of Oxford in the 1950s and 1960s. His early work was in philosophy of action and the philosophy of the social sciences — A Short History of Ethics (1966) was a widely used textbook that already showed the historical sensibility that would dominate his later work.

Moved to the United States in 1970. Taught at Brandeis University, Boston University, Wellesley College, and Vanderbilt University before settling at the University of Notre Dame (1988), where he was appointed O’Brien Senior Research Professor of Philosophy. The move to Notre Dame was not accidental: MacIntyre had converted to Roman Catholicism in the early 1980s, and the Thomistic tradition — the intellectual inheritance of Thomas Aquinas — became the tradition from which he argued. The conversion is intellectually load-bearing: MacIntyre’s defence of tradition-constituted rationality is itself conducted from within a specific tradition, and he has been explicit that this is not a weakness but a consequence of his own thesis.

Continues to publish and lecture. His career arc — from Marxism in the 1950s and 1960s, through a period of engagement with analytic philosophy, to the Aristotelian-Thomistic position of After Virtue onward — is itself an example of the tradition-to-tradition movement his philosophy describes.

After Virtue and the Enlightenment failure

After Virtue (1981) begins from a thought experiment: imagine a catastrophe that destroys the institutions and practices of science, leaving only fragments — equations without context, instruments without understanding, theories without the traditions of inquiry that gave them meaning. The fragments are preserved and reassembled into something called “science,” but it is a simulacrum — the words are used but the practices that gave them content are gone. MacIntyre argues that this is the actual condition of moral discourse in the modern West. We possess moral vocabulary — rights, justice, duty, virtue — but the traditions of practice that gave these concepts their meaning have been disrupted, and what remains is a set of rival assertions with no shared framework for adjudicating between them.

The diagnosis: the Enlightenment attempted to ground morality in universal reason — reason independent of any particular tradition, culture, or community. The attempt failed because no such ground was found. Kant grounded morality in pure practical reason; Hume grounded it in the passions; utilitarians grounded it in consequences. Each claimed universality; each was contested; no resolution was reached. The failure was not accidental — it was structural. Morality had been embedded in a teleological framework (Aristotelian: human beings have a telos, a natural end, and virtues are the qualities needed to reach it). The Enlightenment rejected the teleological framework while attempting to retain the moral content. Without the framework, the content cannot be rationally grounded.

MacIntyre’s constructive move: return to a version of the Aristotelian tradition — not as nostalgia but as the recognition that moral reasoning requires a tradition with a conception of the human good, a community of practice, and a narrative structure within which individual lives make sense.

Tradition-constituted rationality

Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) develops the positive account. Rationality is not a neutral standard that transcends all traditions; it is constituted within traditions. A tradition is not a static set of beliefs but a historically extended argument — an ongoing conversation about the goods the tradition pursues, the standards of inquiry it applies, and the problems it encounters. Traditions have histories: they develop, face challenges, encounter crises, and sometimes make progress (by their own lights).

Incommensurability. Different traditions can have different and incompatible standards of rationality. The Augustinian tradition, the Aristotelian tradition, the liberal tradition — each has its own criteria for what counts as a good argument, what counts as evidence, and what the central problems are. There is no tradition-independent standpoint from which to rank them.

Epistemological crisis. A tradition enters an epistemological crisis when it encounters problems it cannot solve with its own resources — when its own standards of inquiry produce results that undermine its own commitments. The crisis is resolvable only by a creative reformulation that preserves the tradition’s core while incorporating insights from outside it. MacIntyre’s paradigm case: Aquinas’s integration of Augustinian theology with Aristotelian philosophy — a reformulation that was not a surrender to the rival tradition but an enrichment of the home tradition that also explained why the rival tradition had the resources it did.

Learning across traditions. If traditions are incommensurable, how can they learn from each other? MacIntyre’s answer: a person can be formed in one tradition and then learn a second “as a second first language” — acquiring not just the vocabulary but the standards of argument, the central texts, and the modes of inquiry from the inside. This bilingual person can then recognise the resources of the second tradition that address the home tradition’s epistemological crisis. The process is not translation (finding equivalents) but inhabitation (learning to think within the rival framework).

Liberalism as a tradition. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? argues that liberalism is itself a tradition — not the neutral meta-framework it claims to be. Liberalism has its own founding texts, its own criteria of rationality, its own conception of the good (procedural fairness, individual autonomy). Its claim to be above all traditions is itself a tradition-specific claim.

Where MacIntyre stops

MacIntyre’s thesis — that rationality is tradition-constituted — applies to his own position. He argues from within the Thomistic tradition and defends it as the tradition best able to learn from its rivals (because Aquinas demonstrated the capacity to incorporate Aristotelian and Augustinian resources). Critics have pressed on whether this is a philosophical conclusion or a partisan judgment dressed in philosophical clothing. If the criterion for tradition-superiority is the ability to survive epistemological crises by incorporating rival insights, and the Thomistic tradition is held up as the paradigm of this ability, the argument risks circularity: the tradition that best exemplifies the criterion is the one that formulated the criterion.

The mechanism for learning across traditions — inhabiting a second tradition “as a second first language” — is structurally demanding. It requires individuals who can achieve genuine bilingual competence across incommensurable traditions. Whether this is possible for more than exceptional individuals, and whether the results of such individuals’ judgments can be transmitted to communities that have not undergone the same formation, is unclear. The mechanism describes what learning across traditions would look like; it does not explain how to institutionalise it. Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift have argued that recognising liberalism as a tradition does not undermine it — that liberalism can acknowledge its own historicity and continue to function, which is exactly what a tradition is supposed to do.

MacIntyre’s relationship to politics is deliberately underdeveloped. He has described himself as holding “what I regard as Marxist conclusions but in the very different terms of Thomistic theory,” and has argued that contemporary politics offers no adequate institutional expression of the tradition-based moral reasoning he defends. The underdevelopment is principled — he resists the premature identification of his position with any existing political programme — but it leaves the question of what Thomistic-Aristotelian politics would look like in practice almost entirely unaddressed.

Key works

See also: Berlin · Gadamer · Connolly