Alasdair MacIntyre and the Quest for Moral Coherence

We live in an age of moral clamor and moral confusion. Everywhere the words of virtue are invoked—justice, freedom, rights, dignity—yet their meanings slip through our hands. Debates that should clarify end in stalemate. Arguments that should persuade collapse into outrage. It is not that we lack convictions, but that we no longer share the language to make them intelligible to one another.

This was the condition Alasdair MacIntyre diagnosed in After Virtue, first published in 1981, at a moment when Western societies were reeling from the crises of the 1960s, the disillusionment of the 1970s, and the moral confusion of the Cold War. MacIntyre’s claim was stark: we live amid the fragments of a once-coherent moral tradition, speaking words whose original grammar has been lost. “The most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance,” he wrote, “is that so much of it is used to express disagreements; and the most striking feature of the debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable character” (After Virtue, p. 6).

Modern moral discourse feels empty because we no longer share a conception of the human good.

The breakdown began with the Enlightenment. By discarding the idea of telos—a shared human purpose—philosophers tried to ground morality on reason alone. Hume reduced it to passion, Kant to rational will, utilitarians to pleasure. None succeeded in producing a standard compelling enough to hold society together. “What we possess,” MacIntyre concluded, “are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived” (After Virtue, p. 2).

Into this vacuum rushed what he called emotivism: the view that moral judgments are nothing more than expressions of feeling. “Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments… are nothing but expressions of attitude or feeling” (After Virtue, p. 11). To say “justice is good” becomes indistinguishable from saying “I approve of justice.” Public life, under these conditions, degenerates into a contest of wills, where persuasion often shades into manipulation. Nietzsche grasped this more clearly than anyone: behind appeals to morality lies the will to power. MacIntyre credited Nietzsche’s brilliance but rejected his nihilism.

The choice, he insisted, is not between Enlightenment illusion and Nietzschean despair, but between Nietzsche and Aristotle.

Aristotle, for MacIntyre, provided the missing piece: teleology. Human beings, he argued, can only be understood in light of their purposes, and virtues are those qualities that enable us to flourish. His innovation was to rethink ethics around the concept of “practices.” A practice is “any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity” (After Virtue, p. 187)—chess, medicine, farming, teaching. Practices yield two kinds of goods: internal goods, achievable only through participation (mastery, integrity, healing), and external goods, like money, power, or prestige.

Virtues are the habits that allow us to realize internal goods and to resist the corrupting pull of external ones. “Without justice, courage, and honesty,” he wrote, “the internal goods of practices are barred to us” (After Virtue, p. 191).

But virtues cannot survive in isolation. A human life must have a narrative unity. “The unity of a human life,” MacIntyre insisted, “is the unity of a narrative quest” (After Virtue, p. 219). And such narratives unfold within traditions, which he defined as “an historically extended, socially embodied argument” (Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, p. 12). Traditions are not static inheritances but evolving debates. Rationality itself is tradition-constituted: each tradition has standards of reasoning that can be compared, tested, and sometimes transcended. This is why MacIntyre rejected the charge of relativism. Traditions can be judged by whether they can resolve crises that defeat their rivals.

Virtues require practices, practices require traditions, and traditions provide the narratives within which a life can cohere.

This was also why MacIntyre distrusted the liberal state and modern capitalism. Liberalism, he argued, is not a neutral framework but a tradition in disguise—one that rests on the fiction of the “unencumbered self,” detached from unchosen ties like family, community, and nation. His acid remark—dying for the nation-state is like “being asked to die for the telephone company” (After Virtue, p. 255)—was more than wit. It captured his view that bureaucratic institutions, stripped of substantive ends, cannot inspire genuine devotion.

Capitalism, for its part, systematically privileges external goods. It turns teaching into a career ladder, scholarship into a prestige contest, medicine into a business. “When the notion of practices is lost,” MacIntyre warned, “what is lost are those settings in which the virtues can be exhibited” (After Virtue, p. 194).

His solution was radical but not utopian. He ended After Virtue with an image that has become iconic: “What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained… we are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict” (After Virtue, p. 263). These communities, he argued, would not be nostalgic retreats but living laboratories of virtue, preserving and renewing the conditions for moral life amid cultural decay.

MacIntyre’s solution is simple but demanding: rebuild communities where the virtues can live, even if the larger culture cannot.

Critics have called this nostalgic, naïve, or antiliberal. Some accuse him of relativism, others of dismissing genuine Enlightenment achievements like human rights. His infamous quip—“there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and unicorns” (After Virtue, p. 69)—has often been misunderstood. MacIntyre was not denying human dignity but attacking the Enlightenment attempt to detach it from a teleological framework. Even those who disagree with him, from Martha Nussbaum to Charles Taylor, acknowledge the power of his analysis. Taylor put it succinctly: MacIntyre “brought home in the most powerful way the incoherence of our present moral culture” (Sources of the Self, 1989).

What makes MacIntyre urgent today is not only his diagnosis but his remedy. In a world dominated by fleeting identities, fragile institutions, and polarized politics, he calls us back to practices, virtues, and traditions. This does not mean retreating in despair. It means building schools, professions, families, and neighborhoods where goods internal to practice—truth, justice, excellence—take precedence over money, power, and status.

The task is not to lament the loss of coherence but to create the places where coherence can begin again.

That is MacIntyre’s challenge. He offers no easy comfort. But he offers clarity, and with it, a demanding hope: that even in dark ages, the intellectual and moral life can be preserved, if we have the courage to rebuild the conditions in which the virtues can flourish. ◳

From the final paragraph of After Virtue (1981, p. 263):

“What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.”