Alisdair MacIntyre (1929-2025): The man who diagnosed the West’s moral crisis

The Scottish born philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre, who died aged 96 last week, enjoyed an illustrious academic career in both Britain and the United States. But the work he will always be remembered for, is most certainly After Virtue.

Over 40 years since its publication, it remains one of the most pertinent books to read for those seeking an understanding of the modern world. 

After Virtue

To give a brief account is not easy. The disturbing thesis is that the moral norms of today were formulated originally through a shared conception of the human good — a conception that has since been lost. In the wake of that loss, modern philosophers have attempted and failed to find another foundation for these moral norms.  

To put that slightly differently, in the pre-modern world — before the 17th century Enlightenment — people in the West had a mutual understanding of the purpose and destiny of human beings.

This mutual understanding made agreement about moral behavior possible. Roughly speaking, actions that helped individuals move closer to their ultimate purpose were considered morally good, while those that did not were seen as morally bad. 

At this point, MacIntyre was articulating a moral vision that came not from Christianity but from Aristotle. In ethics, the Aristotelian tradition said that, in order for something to be good, it must achieve its inherent purpose. For example, a good watch is a watch that displays the time precisely, that is comfortable to wear on your wrist, that doesn’t run out of battery, and so forth.

The same is true of a human being: a good human being is one who fulfils his purpose. And the purpose of a human life, in this view, is to excel in virtue. The successful pursuit of virtue leads to “eudaimonia”, which means the blessed life.  

The rise of Emotivism

The problem we have now, said MacIntyre, is that Aristotelian ethics was rejected during the Enlightenment by philosophers who claimed to be able to ground morality in reason alone. But the attempt to ground ethics purely on rationality was a failure.

What followed was a movement beyond enlightenment rationalism and modernity to what we might call a postmodern vision of the ethical world. MacIntyre’s diagnosis describes our current stage as “emotivism”— a justification of moral beliefs founded on emotion: This action is good or bad because I feel it to be so, for whatever reason. 

The problem, of course, is that a shared moral framework cannot be built on feelings. Not least because emotional responses vary by the individual but even an individual’s own feelings change over time. Thus, we have lost the ability to have a meaningful, shared conversation about the good life, and the consequence is a disastrous loss of social and cultural cohesion. 

There is a lot more to it than that, but this is the basic idea. For what it is worth, I believe that there has been no more pertinent analysis of the moral malaise that besets the modern West.  

What MacIntyre Leaves Unsaid

And yet, After Virtue is somewhat open-ended as a work of philosophy. MacIntyre suggests that the good life can still be pursued in small communities with a shared moral framework, however, he does not give any description of what the good life actually is, even in a communal context. And so, any such community would still have the same problem he describes throughout the book — a lack of objective purpose. 

In the final paragraph of the book, MacIntyre suggests that the cultural moment of the West is not unlike that of the world amid the fall of the Roman Empire. Around that point, St Benedict formulated his famous rule, which would result in the preservation of Western culture through the scholarly endeavour of Benedictine monks. MacIntyre says we need a new, though very different, St Benedict, who will cast a vision that will result in the preservation of our crumbling civilisation. 

One of the lasting legacies of this suggestion is, of course, Rod Dreher’s bestselling and hugely influential book The Benedict Option, which picks up from this very point. It offers a Christian articulation of what such communities might look like in the ever-increasingly post-Christian West.

When our schools, universities, political structures, legal systems, and all major institutions have become hostile to Christianity and to Christian civilisation, what do we do? The answer is that we preserve, love, teach, and pass that civilisation on to the next generation, even in the face of the barbarians who have assumed authority. 

Alisdair MacIntyre became a Roman Catholic Christian not long after writing After Virtue and it is, indeed, a work pointing to the truth on every page. Taken seriously, it serves as an inevitable primer to the Christian worldview. In the West, we simply cannot survive without a return to the faith. MacIntyre was one of the first to really show us why and he shall be remembered for it.