By Wyatt Graham, TGC.
(image credit: Saun O’Connor/Wikimedia Creative Commons)
Alasdair MacIntyre (1929–2025) was one of the 20th century’s most significant moral philosophers. He was a highly sought-after professor, with stops at prestigious institutions like Oxford, Brandeis, Duke, and Notre Dame.
Though I never met MacIntyre, his work exposed the ways my assumptions about the world were often formed more by modernistic, liberal values and Kantian ethics than by God’s truth. “We are all of us,” explains MacIntyre, “inhabitants of advanced modernity, bearing its social and cultural marks.”
MacIntyre’s most famous work, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, was published in 1981. It has remained in print ever since. This carefully argued book has gone through three editions and been translated into numerous languages. His thesis is that the lack of a coherent philosophy within culture meant that “we have—very largely, if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, [of] morality.” For this reason, we have no standard against which to compare our moral arguments.
The solution to this problem, he proposes, is an Aristotelian virtue ethic (which he later modified to a Thomistic version) that can fill in the void. After Virtue is a seminal book that shaped public ethical debates, and it became the first of a trilogy of books that also includes Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (1990). Throughout his works, MacIntyre consistently points out our culture’s collective amnesia about the past and the always true goodness of, well, goodness.
As MacIntyre, a Roman Catholic, notes in After Virtue, “What liberalism promotes is a kind of institutional order that is inimical to the construction and sustaining of the types of communal relationship required for the best kind of human life.” By pointing to something other than liberalism as a means by which we can live the good life—namely, virtue—MacIntyre put into words an idea that changed the way I understood Scripture. I came to see how the Bible pointed me toward purpose and virtue, which are experienced in Christian community and grounded in the Christian tradition.