Alasdair MacIntyre obituary

The Guardian

25-05-2025

In 1981, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who has died aged 96, tore up the work he was then writing on ethics, and produced what became his best known book, After Virtue. In it, he excoriated current moral philosophy and, indeed, current morality itself, complaining that morality has been cut off from its roots in tradition, and, 'largely thanks to the Enlightenment project', has ceased to be coherent.
No longer anchored in the Aristotelian notion that humans have a goal and function, or offering an account of how these are to be fulfilled, it divorces values from facts. Although calling a person, practice or action 'good' or 'bad' seemingly appeals to 'an objective and impersonal standard', said MacIntyre, there is none available. As he had already lamented in Against the Self-Images of the Age (1971), Christianity, Marxism and psychoanalysis have failed to provide an adequate communal ideology.
Describing himself as 'a revolutionary Aristotelian', he was also an enthusiast for the ethics of Aristotle's medieval follower, Thomas Aquinas. 'Forward to the 13th century,' was the motto jokingly attributed to him.
But by reviving the sort of ethics that identifies 'the good' with human flourishing, MacIntyre aimed to lead us out of 'the new dark ages', presumably into a better future. He influenced the resurgence of virtue ethics and communitarianism (he denied espousing either), and the now fashionable distrust of liberalism, individualism and the Enlightenment.
Remarkable for the number of conflicting beliefs that he could, often simultaneously, embrace, he was both Protestant and Marxist in the 1960s, then rejected both creeds, and, in the 80s, became a Catholic; but he always retained his Marxist disgust at capitalism and at the alienation of modernity.
MacIntyre was 52 when he wrote After Virtue. In A Short History of Ethics (1966), he he had already berated contemporary analytic philosophy for examining and interpreting moral concepts 'apart from their history', and portrayed how 'moral concepts change as social life changes' – from the Homeric era when to be agathos (the ideal for well-born men) was to be kingly, courageous and clever; through Aristotelian and Christian virtues, which also attuned ethics to an (albeit different) notion of essential human nature; through the Enlightenment's uprooting insistence on autonomous reason; to 20th-century emotivism, which makes ethics merely an expression of personal preference.
In the late 70s, MacIntyre read the physicist Thomas Kuhn, who regarded scientific change as a series of 'paradigm shifts' rather than a line of progress, and this gave him, if not a Damascene conversion, then a clinching certainty as to what was so grotesque about 20th-century morality: rather than being settled in a particular ethical paradigm, we operate simultaneously or alternately with several incommensurable moral traditions. 'Imagine,' runs the opening of After Virtue, 'that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe', that science and science teaching have been deliberately abolished, and only charred pages, disconnected scientific terms and meaningless incantations remain.
This, said MacIntyre, is our current moral situation. Like the 18th-century Polynesians who talked of 'taboos' to Captain Cook but were unable to say what they meant by that term, all we have are 'the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance is derived'. This is why we regard moral argument as 'necessarily interminable'; we do not even expect to reach consensus. Should we prioritise human rights and/or the general happiness, individual choice and/or the general will, hedonism and will-to-power and/or compassion and self-abnegation?
Aristotle's ethics in the 4th century BC had assumed that humans have a telos (function) as rational animals, said MacIntyre. Theistic beliefs – Jewish, Christian and Muslim – complicated, without essentially altering, the three-fold ethical scheme: designed to move us from 'human-nature-as-it-happens-to be' via moral education and moral principles to 'human-nature-as-it-could-be-if-it-realised-its-telos'. Eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers, however, in aiming to liberate us from superstition and authority, and to find a purely rational basis for ethics, had stripped the self of social identity and values of any claim to factual status.
Thus morality became a set of inordinate commands and, ultimately, mere 'private arbitrariness'. The unembedded self – essentially 'nothing' – is now obliged to choose its own values.
Admittedly, Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism aimed to ground ethics in the 'natural' desire to avoid suffering and maximise pleasure. But 'human happiness is not a unitary simple notion', said MacIntyre, and John Stuart Mill's distinction between higher and lower pleasures only highlighted utilitarianism's failure to 'provide us with a criterion for making our key choices'.
MacIntyre was advocating a revised Aristotelianism in which morality is, once again, not a set of abstract, autonomously selected principles but a social narrative into which our own personal narrative fits. Bernard Williams, however, called After Virtue 'a brilliant nostalgic fantasy', arguing that the socially distinct moral self, rather than being a product of the Enlightenment, was already present in Plato and Christianity.
MacIntyre's subsequent books constituted, it was said, An Interminably Long History of Ethics, and he himself quoted this with rueful amusement. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990) reiterated that analytic philosophers purport to present 'the timeless form of practical reasoning', while actually just 'representing the form of practical reason specific to their own liberal individualist culture'.
It is impossible, argued MacIntyre, to adopt a moral position except from within a particular tradition. This, since he offers no way of arbitrating between them, would seem to oblige him to say that any tradition would be as good as any other, and he has been accused of being a moral relativist.
However, he said that competing traditions share some standards, so that anyone is able to apprehend problems in their own tradition and adopt rationally superior solutions from another, as Aquinas did in integrating Aristotelianism into Augustine's theology, ultimately becoming a better Aristotelian than Aristotle himself. MacIntyre converted to Thomism and Catholicism, attending mass virtually every day, but refraining from taking communion on account of having been divorced.
Having refused to accept a concept of human nature independent of history, and of particular practices and traditions, MacIntyre ultimately extended his metaphysical grounding to include, in Dependent Rational Animals (1999), a biological one. He pointed out how the ethics of Aristotle, and later of Adam Smith, David Hume and other Enlightenment philosophers, failed to acknowledge the inevitability of suffering and dependence in human life.
Their notion of the human was, at least implicitly, a healthy male; they effectively overlooked women, enslaved people, peasants and non-Europeans. MacIntyre advocated a more inclusive idea of what it is to be human, and an acknowledgment of 'our resemblances to and commonality with members of some other intelligent animal species'; dolphins, he insisted, being closely akin.
Neither the modern nation-state nor the modern family, he argued, can provide the right sort of political and social association. What would? MacIntyre sometimes alluded to the cohesive aims of tiny fishing communities and gestured at the desirability of many small utopias. He undertook a three-year research project at London Metropolitan University into whether and in what ways Aquinas's 'conception of the common good of political societies might find application in the politics of modern societies' – the result of which was his last book, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (2016).
Born in Glasgow, Alasdair was the son of Eneas MacIntyre and his wife, Margaret (nee Chalmers), both Scottish doctors of Irish descent. Although brought up in London and educated at Epsom college, Surrey, he was proud of his grounding in the Irish-Scottish Gaelic oral tradition. While he was studying classics at Queen Mary College, University of London (1945-49), the surrounding poverty of the East End led him to become a fervent Marxist.
His first book, Marxism: An Interpretation (1953), demanded a Marxist renewal of Christianity. Republished in a revised edition as Marxism and Christianity, it was sympathetic and sceptical about both. Even before the Hungarian uprising of 1956, he had left the Communist party, subsequently joining the Socialist Labour League, a Trotskyist group led by the notorious Gerry Healy. He was in frequent debate with the Marxist historian EP Thompson, who used to stick notes on the windscreen of MacIntyre's car urging him to publish his thoughts on socialist consciousness.
After gaining an MA at Manchester University (1951), where he then taught the philosophy of religion, MacIntyre lectured in philosophy at Leeds University (1957-61), was a research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford (1961-62), senior fellow at Princeton (1962-63), fellow of University College, Oxford (1963-66), and professor of sociology at Essex University (1966-70).
As dean of students there he opposed the student unrest over the summary expulsion of three students who had shouted down a speaker from Porton Down (the research site for chemical and biological warfare). 'Ironically, [the university's] mistake was to be so liberal,' he said; and declared that it was because the students had 'no real practical injustices to fight against' that they 'had to rebel on ideological grounds like germ warfare and Vietnam which we were powerless to alter'.
His attitude was considered disingenuous by some (after all, the university need not have invited the Porton Down speaker); to others, it was part of his characteristically contradictory and fastidiously tailored integrity. Partly due to these ructions, he moved to the US to become professor of history of ideas at Brandeis University (1970-72). He later held professorships at Boston, Vanderbilt and Duke universities, and finally at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana (1988-94 and 2000-10, then emeritus).
MacIntyre disdained the class associations of Oxbridge, and loved his involvement with London Metropolitan, where he held a post from 2010 onwards. Before speaking at a conference there in 2007, he was handed pamphlets about a students' strike over a lecturer's contract, and he prefaced his paper with an impromptu diatribe in support of trades unions and workers' rights. The first to raise his hand after MacIntyre's paper was the Socialist Worker party leader Alex Callinicos, who accused him of not being a proper revolutionary. MacIntyre replied that he didn't know how to make a revolution, but it was clear that Callinicos didn't either.
He is survived by his third wife, Lynn Sumida Joy, and by two daughters from his first marriage, to Anne Peri, and a son and a daughter from his second marriage, to Susan Willans.
Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre, philosopher, born 12 January 1929; died 22 May 2025