Learning from MacIntyre

By Pickwick Publications

Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the major philosophers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. After Virtue, first published in 1981, remains the book for which he is best known but, as this volume testifies, his phenomenal output extends over a period of seven decades. Not only is his output extensive, but its impact, unusually for philosophers, has been wide-ranging. As MacIntyre enters his tenth decade, this book pays tribute not just to his work, but to the way in which it has been influential across disciplines outside of philosophy. Beginning with an intellectual biography, the chapters which follow, written by experts in their fields, explore MacIntyre's contributions to theology, Thomism, moral philosophy, classical philosophy, political philosophy, Marxism, the Frankfurt School, communication, business ethics, sociology, education, law, and therapeutic method. Essential reading for scholars from across these disciplines, and for anyone who wishes to understand MacIntyre's contributions, this volume not only helps readers to appreciate what we may learn from MacIntyre, but also indicates how his work will continue to be influential.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Oct 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781532685248

Book preview

Introduction

Ron Beadle & Geoff Moore

Most who discover the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre do so second-hand, through their own discipline rather than his. This book is designed for such readers. Although there is a large secondary literature on MacIntyre, most of it sits within disciplines;¹ this book is an attempt to cast the net more widely. We wanted to compile a text that would introduce the way in which MacIntyre speaks to different traditions and to different disciplines—the kind of book that we would find useful as scholars who themselves work in a particular discipline.

We were both teaching in Newcastle Business School, UK in the late 1990s, when we found to our surprise that we had each been reading Alasdair MacIntyre. We eagerly began to talk about how his work reframed our understanding of the workplace, and later to write about this and to write to him, asking for clarifications and to see what might have gone wrong with our own arguments. We did not always agree with each other or with him, but we knew that his theses could transform the way in which work organizations are understood.

In the mid-2000s we organized a symposium at Durham University in which philosophers, sociologists and business ethicists discussed his work. Unbeknown to us, Kelvin Knight was already organizing a much more significant event at London Metropolitan University. And so in 2007 over 100 scholars met for a conference in London opened by MacIntyre himself. The conference attracted Marxists who had known MacIntyre as a comrade in the 1960s, Thomistic Catholics who had known him as a profound influence from the 1980s onward, and others who knew little or nothing of these allegiances. Arguments were had, discoveries made, late nights were the norm and a sense of amazement at the breadth of his influence was evident just from looking around the room.

MacIntyre had brought together people who would never normally encounter one another, and a level of intellectual energy and excitement resulted that was incomparable to the disciplinary conferences to which we were all used. On their return to the United States, Christopher Lutz, Thomas Osborne and Jeff Nicholas decided that this event had to be repeated, in part to attract many American scholars who been unable to attend the London conference. In 2008, this second conference took place in the St Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology, Indiana. The noted theologian Stanley Hauerwas was a keynote speaker. For doctoral students working with MacIntyre’s ideas, and even a small number of undergraduates who attended such as Caleb Bernacchio, these conferences provided opportunities to test ideas and encounter others working with similar issues in different disciplines and different traditions.

The International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry (ISME)² formalized the developing project to create opportunities for such dialogue to continue. Jim Kelly arranged for his Law students at Notre Dame to see us through incorporation as an educational charity based in Indiana. We have subsequently held conferences in Dublin, Vilnius, Providence, Nottingham, Grand Rapids, Athens, St Louis, Wroclaw, Paris, and Durham as well as contributing panels at other academic events. A range of publications has emerged from this work, alongside an online presence, active social media and hundreds of members across the globe.

The royalties from this volume will go to the Society but, more importantly, our aim is to enable some of the flavor of our work to become available to people who cannot attend these conferences. We are keenly aware of our own privilege, that our conferences overwhelmingly attract scholars and research students from Europe and North America who have institutional support to attend. Whilst events in Australia and a planned conference in South America will extend our reach, we understand that scholars and students elsewhere find it difficult to join us in person. In seeking a publisher for this project our principal criterion was to produce a volume that would be accessible and priced at a level that such scholars and students could afford. We are enormously grateful to Wipf and Stock whose commitment to this matched our ambition, and to Stanley Hauerwas who recommended them to us. Although we had not anticipated it, one feature of this volume is contributors’ regular use of texts and lectures by MacIntyre that are not easily available. This enables arguments to be considered that readers only familiar with MacIntyre’s books and collections are unlikely to have encountered.

Our contributors share an understanding that, whilst the products of the work carry their own names, they should be understood as common goods—they could not have been achieved without ongoing dialogue and constrained dispute between scholars. In this spirit we challenged our contributors to write about MacIntyre in the context of their own tradition or discipline. They have responded in a variety of ways—some focus on how MacIntyre’s work has been taken up, challenged and developed in their disciplines (Beabout, Dunne, Fritz), others about what his work means for practice (especially Kelly), some about what should be but has not yet been learned from him (Osborne, Angier, McMylor, Blackledge and Korkut Raptis), others show both what has been learned and what has not (Bernacchio and Knight, Malakos, McMylor), and finally some explore how his work integrates material from different disciplines and thereby encourage readers to consider their relationships (Hauerwas, Lear, Nicholas).

Peter McMylor advised one of us before we first met Alasdair MacIntyre in person, that the last thing he wants is fawning admiration. This was wise guidance from the first person to have written his intellectual biography.³ Contributors to this volume have sought to summarise MacIntyre’s work, to consider how we have and should learn from it, but also to challenge him; and this is how he would want it. It is not by accident that in each of his volumes MacIntyre thanks participants in symposia that have considered particular arguments and chapters.⁴ In such exchanges, some of which we have been fortunate enough to attend, he considers challenges, refines his theses, develops his arguments and anticipates objections.

To engage in such exchanges well, to learn that all-too-difficult virtue of being genuinely grateful for correction, to be robust in our defences and to identify incoherence, poor argumentation or weak evidence, requires both us and our interlocutors to care for truth above all. It requires us to observe an ethics of enquiry that necessitates listening with care, to persevere with difficult ideas and to judge fairly; in other words, to observe the precepts of natural law.

Such forms of deliberative and shared reasoning must be at least as cross-disciplinary as the subjects they consider, and amongst MacIntyre’s hallmarks as a philosopher is his deployment of arguments and evidence from sociology, history, psychology and many others. Excessive disciplinary divisions and early specialization prevents scholars from encountering and working with those from other disciplines and traditions. As a result, we are likely to see parts of our own traditions and disciplines clearly, but others poorly. When challenged by critics from another tradition, we may have few sound defences to make. The decline in theistic belief has, for example, involved the failure of theists to defend their positions against critics, particularly natural scientists. Were they to understand the recent findings of natural science better then they would be able to engage with such critics on more equal terms.⁵

Where theology and philosophy once integrated scholarly understanding so that different elements of our disciplinary learning could be contextualized within wider commitments, contemporary scholars now have to do this work for themselves, or else fall into an incoherence which is either not recognized or, if it is, may appear inevitable. But this is not inevitable and the engagements that MacIntyreans have undertaken with one another, in part to overcome these very limitations, have also and happily meant that we have become one another’s teachers, students and friends. This volume is above all an attempt to capture that spirit of enquiry, to encourage scholars working with MacIntyre’s theses to look up from their disciplinary microscopes, if not to seek a telescope, at least to seek some perspective.

The chapters that follow have been at our invitation, as we sought scholars who could consider MacIntyre’s work in the context of their own disciplines and traditions. There is one exception, however. We invited Christopher Lutz to write an intellectual biography to navigate the development of MacIntyre’s thinking over time. As Lutz argues elsewhere⁶ MacIntyre’s own history embodies the argument that to be rational requires us to give our allegiance to whichever tradition best refutes the arguments made against it. Since his conversion to Catholicism in the late 1980s, MacIntyre has argued that this tradition is Thomistic Aristotelianism, but in a form that bears the influence of Marx above anyone else. Reading MacIntyre’s earlier work without understanding his subsequent conversions is liable to lead to interpretive error and Lutz’s opening chapter provides an antidote. Lutz’s central claim is that a continuity of purpose in his understanding of moral philosophy provides a narrative unity despite the changes in MacIntyre’s allegiances: Moral philosophy, for MacIntyre, would be a study of practical reasoning and of the habits of judgment that Aristotelians associate with the virtue of prudence.

Chapter 2 is a revised version of Stanley Hauerwas’s keynote address God and Alasdair MacIntyre to the 2018 ISME Conference at Durham, UK. In MacIntyre and Theology, Hauerwas considers MacIntyre’s philosophical arguments for Christianity but finds his distinction between philosophy and theology to be both unconvincing and, perhaps more importantly, in conflict with Aquinas. Despite this he concludes that, We might like him to do more, but we should not complain because he has given us more than most contemporary philosophers think possible.

In chapter 3, Thomas Osborne takes up MacIntyre’s relationship to Thomism more widely. His focus is on what Thomists should have learned from MacIntyre but so far have not. In particular, Osborne urges Thomists to engage with MacIntyre’s largely sociological account of moral disagreement, one that challenges Aquinas himself but does not involve a denial of fundamental Thomistic positions. He argues: Learning from MacIntyre that moral judgments are in a way embedded in practices and social roles does not remove moral judgments from the scope of rational evaluation. But it does show that the rational evaluation of moral norms has implications not only for moral theory but also for practice.

In chapter 4, Tolis Malakos considers MacIntyre within the context of contemporary moral philosophy. He argues that MacIntyre’s influence in the rejection of the once popular view that there are no rational foundations for ethics and morality has been sadly overlooked. By contrast to Lutz’s account of the coherence of MacIntyre’s Thomistic Aristotelianism in this volume however, Malakos suggests a tension between MacIntyre’s critique of the Enlightenment and his arguments for the universality of natural law. He argues that, a considerable degree of tension and conflict can be now discerned both in his positive account of practical rationality and action, and in his critique of some of the Enlightenment projects.

In chapter 5, Tom Angier argues for the singular importance of MacIntyre’s own learning as a classicist to understanding the continuity of his mature arguments, and casts him as a Platonizing Aristotelian. Noting how Uncovering and unpacking this continuity, however, is not a straightforward task, his method involves a forensic examination of MacIntyre’s key texts, one that allows him to develop the novel conclusion that, "whereas After Virtue casts Aristotelianism as the antidote to the moral and philosophical failure of the Enlightenment Project, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? casts Aristotle as the antidote to the political philosophical failure of Plato."

In chapter 6, Caleb Bernacchio and Kelvin Knight outline MacIntyre’s political vision, and contrast its Aristotelian focus on politics as a purposive and inclusive activity concerned with the achievement of our common good with the centrality of relations between citizens and state in post-Enlightenment political thought. Acknowledging that MacIntyre has written more on politics than he has published, they consider whether this omission accounts for the neglect of his work by conventional political philosophy. Perhaps, however, the focus of his politics on local political action might bear a greater responsibility. Bernacchio and Knight summarise this dramatically: But what is clear, given the importance of the public goods provided by the state for the flourishing of local communities, and the irrationality and absence of rational enquiry in many state decisions concerning the allocation of resources, is that it is only through conflict—with the state or its many agencies, or often with the large corporations closely aligned with it—that local communities can flourish.

In chapter 7, Paul Blackledge and Buket Korkut Raptis take up MacIntyre’s radical politics in relation to his Marxist roots. They argue that including MacIntyre with other post Marxists who turned to ethics may lie at the root of his neglect but that, while he searched for a justifiable basis for resistance to capitalism, his focus was on the forms of practice that might underpin this alternative rather than the abstract norm through which it might be articulated. Unlike Angier who points to MacIntyre’s roots in classical philosophy, or Lutz, who argues that the relationship between moral philosophy and practical rationality is the abiding feature of MacIntyre’s work, Blackledge and Korkut Raptis maintain that, the strongest elements of MacIntyre’s mature thought stem from the Aristotelian Marxism of his youth.

In chapter 8, Jeffery Nicholas pursues MacIntyre’s relationship to a specific offshoot of Marxism, namely Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Despite MacIntyre’s notorious attack on Herbert Marcuse,⁷ that leading light of the Frankfurt School, Nicholas argues that MacIntyre’s critique of capitalism and Frankfurt School ethics have much to learn from each other: both traditions share a common cause of ending suffering and developing a society free of capitalist inhumanity. That more dialogue has not occurred is a sadness, but one which opens up the possibility of common research programs and solidarity in the task of making the world a place suited for human flourishing.

In chapter 9, Janie Harden Fritz carefully traces MacIntyre’s influence on the development of communication ethics, communication theory and the philosophy of communication. She claims: In each area, his treatment of narrative and tradition as a ground for ethics, as well as the concept of practices emerging from and supporting traditions, appeals to an action-oriented, meaning-centered understanding of human communicative life. A key focus of this chapter is on the agenda-setting potential of MacIntyre’s work in such developing areas as communication and religion, journalism and new media.

In chapter 10, Greg Beabout narrates another field in which MacIntyre has, perhaps surprisingly, enjoyed a sustained influence, business ethics. Beabout locates these developments in the wider growth of business ethics from the 1980s onwards and traces the debates that the interest in his work has spurred. These include the relationship between practices and institutions, the role of the manager, and the virtue of practical wisdom.

In chapter 11, Peter McMylor casts MacIntyre as a singularly sociological philosopher, one whose claims for the intimacy of the relationship between these disciplines sets him apart from the analytical and phenomenological traditions which have dominated philosophy in the late twentieth century. McMylor argues that MacIntyre can best be viewed as belonging to a form of scholarship that can be understood not by adopting the popular term ‘interdisciplinary,’ but rather by that of ‘post-disciplinary.’ Echoing some of Osborne’s arguments as to why Thomists need to pay more attention to MacIntyre’s sociology, McMylor commends MacIntyre’s argument that structural constraints and socially embedded decision-making processes are critical to understanding limitations on moral agency. Alongside the arguments of Fritz and Beabout, McMylor sees MacIntyre’s main influence as deriving from his notion of narrative, of the relationship between practices and institutions, and of the relationship between goods and practices within cultural sociology.

In chapter 12, Joseph Dunne revises his 2018 keynote address to the ISME Conference in Durham that highlights MacIntyre’s ongoing attempt to understand how best to learn from particular thinkers and texts. Dunne outlines his task as: I follow his own example, then—doing unto him what he has done unto others—in asking what can we learn from MacIntyre; more specifically, what can we learn from him about learning itself? His chapter considers MacIntyre’s remarks on learning throughout his career considering how we learn through childhood, through practices, and through engagement in ethics and politics. Anticipating Hauerwas, Dunne characterizes MacIntyre’s distinction between philosophy and theology as an example of the very compartmentalization that he criticizes elsewhere, and one indeed that renders the central notion of a final end opaque in MacIntyre’s work. Perhaps more pointedly, anticipating Lear, Dunne emphasizes the role of human fallibility in MacIntyre’s work as both condition for and limitation of our learning, and points to the need for an expansion of the second-person perspective in MacIntyrean enquiry, especially in respect of relationships which involve pedagogy and relationships involving love. Such a perspective is essential if we are to address the first person weaknesses to which we all are prone.

Jim Kelly opens chapter 13 with a memorable phrase: The law now has little to do with justice. Like a couple in a long, unhappy marriage, they spend a lot of time together but rarely actually talk with one another. However, rather than pursue a natural law critique of positive law, his essay goes on to provide an account of what justice and law would look like in the type of practice-based community that MacIntyre commends. Whilst providing commendable levels of detail as to how the law might be used to create housing trusts that would enable such communities to develop, it is critical to see the role of law as facilitative rather than the primary focus of enquiry. The purpose is clear: When members of the community can call one another neighbors and friends, the networks of giving and receiving so fundamental to the achievement of common goods need not be so fragmented and isolated as they once were.

In our final chapter, Jonathan Lear offers his keynote address to the 2019 conference held at Notre Dame to mark Alasdair MacIntyre’s 90th Birthday. Lear, a philosopher and psychologist, highlights the therapeutic potential of MacIntyre’s recent work. Whereas Aristotle’s Ethics spoke to readers in pursuit of the good life, MacIntyre’s directs his readers to the ways in which lives go wrong. Both resonate with their intended audience. Nevertheless, Lear takes up MacIntyre on not being Aristotelian enough in denying the importance of happiness in human flourishing. Lear argues we need the guidance of theorists such as MacIntyre to put our social structures in question, but we also need good friends to provide the second-person perspective that Dunne highlights, and a psychoanalyst for dealing with the non-rational parts of our souls.

This book is designed to be read as a whole or as the moment of interest strikes you. In either case, however, we hope that it helps convince you that in place of our conventional academic specialization, one of the most important lessons to be learned from MacIntyre is the need to learn from one another.

Any project such as this incurs a variety of debts and a long list of those to whom we should be, and are, grateful. This list includes our contributors, who have been generous in their responses to our requests, swift (mainly) in meeting our deadlines, and both thoughtful and erudite. A second debt is to our reviewers for taking the time to consider earlier versions of this text and to provide excellent suggestions. A third is to Wipf and Stock for their agreement to participate in this project, for their professionalism and also for their flexibility, care and commitment throughout. A fourth debt is to our institutions for giving us the time and resource to pursue this and many other projects in which we have sought to defend, extend and apply MacIntyre’s work. This debt is not only to our managers in the Newcastle and Durham University Business Schools but also to the cleaners, reception staff, professional support colleagues and many others without whom these institutions would not provide us, our colleagues and our students with the opportunity to teach, research and learn. A fifth debt is to the hundreds of scholars and students with whom we have discussed and debated these ideas and to the International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry. Our sixth debt is to Cumbrian artist Alison Dyer-Smith for permission to use her painting The Virtues as the front cover image. Our seventh debt is of a more personal nature and due to our life partners, Shakuntala and Alison, who have once again exemplified the virtue of patience during this project. Finally, the debt that we, alongside the other contributors to this volume, owe to Alasdair MacIntyre is unrepayable. The best we can do is to invite others to learn, as we have learned, from his remarkable body of work.

Bibliography

Hannan, Jason. Ethics under Capital: MacIntyre, Communication, and the Culture Wars. New York: Bloomsbury,

2019

.

Lutz, Christopher Stephen. Tradition in the Ethics of Alasdair MacIntyre: Relativism, Thomism, and Philosophy. Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2009

.

MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue.

3

rd ed. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,

2007

.

———. Comments on God, Philosophy, and Universities. YouTube Video,

2:04:21

. September

10, 2014.

https://youtu.be/mCwKdkW6-lw.

———. Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2016

.

———. God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield,

2009

.

———. Intractable Moral Disagreements. In Intractable Disputes about the Natural Law: Alasdair MacIntyre and His Critics, edited by Lawrence S. Cunningham,

1

–

52

. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,

2009

.

———. Marcuse: An Exposition and Polemic. New York: Viking,

1970

.

———. Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition. London: Duckworth,

1990

.

McMylor, Peter. Alasdair MacIntyre: Critic of Modernity. London: Routledge,

1994.

Moore, Geoff. Virtue at Work: Ethics for Individuals, Managers, and Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2017

.

1

. Recent examples include Hannan, Ethics under Capital; Moore, Virtue at Work.

2

. See www.macintyreanenquiry.org.

3

. McMylor, MacIntyre.

4

. For example, see MacIntyre, After Virtue, xviii–xix; Three Rival Versions, ix; Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, xii.

5

. MacIntyre made this argument in remarks to a Symposium at the The De Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at Notre Dame on his volume God, Philosophy, Universities. See MacIntyre, Comments on God, Philosophy, and Universities,

1

:

32

:

35

.

6

. Lutz, Tradition.

7

. MacIntyre, Marcuse.

1

Alasdair MacIntyre: An Intellectual Biography

Christopher Stephen Lutz

Alasdair MacIntyre is a British philosopher. He is ethnically Scottish, born in Glasgow, but raised in and around London. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Classics at Queen Mary College in the University of London in 1949, and completed his MA in Philosophy in 1951 at Manchester University in northwestern England. MacIntyre began his teaching career at Manchester as Lecturer in Philosophy of Religion and later took teaching and administrative posts at Leeds University, then at Oxford, and then Essex, before moving to the United States in 1970 where he taught at a succession of elite colleges and universities until retiring from teaching in 2010. His 1981 book, After Virtue, initiated a mature project in ethics and politics that has informed six more monographs and two volumes of selected essays. His most recent book, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (2016), integrates the main themes of his entire career in a single argument defending moral philosophy as a study of practical reasoning that learns through experience.

For seven decades, MacIntyre has sought to articulate the meaning and rational justification of moral judgments in terms of human action. The goal of this intellectual biography is to show how MacIntyre’s mature work builds upon his early work on the meaning and rational justification of moral judgments. I will begin with his education, sketching his student life from published remarks. Then I will divide MacIntyre’s career as he did in an interview published in the journal Cogito.¹ From 1949 to 1971, MacIntyre pursued a variety of general enquiries. From 1971 to 1977, MacIntyre reexamined his philosophical presuppositions and tested the waters of Aristotelianism. Then, beginning in 1977 as he "began to write the final draft of After Virtue,"² MacIntyre has developed his mature project.

Education

Alasdair MacIntyre is the son of two medical doctors. Born in 1929, he grew up in and around London, amid the marvels of modern life and the horrors of modern war. He is also the nephew of aunts and uncles who were at home in their traditional culture in the west of Scotland. He grew up with both cultures:

Long before I was old enough to study philosophy I had the philosophical good fortune to be educated in two antagonistic systems of belief and attitude. On the one hand, my early imagination was engrossed by a Gaelic oral culture of farmers and fishermen, poets and storytellers. . . . On the other hand, I was taught . . . that learning to speak or to read Gaelic was an idle, antiquarian pastime, a waste of time for someone whose education was designed to enable him to pass those examinations that are the threshold of bourgeois life in the modern world.³

The two cultures were quite different. One spoke in its own language to its own people, and the other sought to speak in every language to every people:

The modern world was a culture of theories rather than stories. It also presented itself as the milieu of what purported to be morality as such; its claims upon us were allegedly not those of some particular social group, but those of universal rational humanity. So, part of my mind was occupied by stories about Saint Columba,⁴ Brian Boru,⁵ Iain Lom,⁶ and part by inchoate theoretical ideas, which I did not as yet know derived from the liberalism of Kant and Mill.⁷

The differences between these two kinds of cultures bear some consideration.

Stories are narratives about protagonists in history. Stories require audiences to judge their protagonists’ actions, to celebrate their triumphs and to lament their failures. The lessons a story can teach clearly depend upon the character of the interpreter. Theories are quite different. Theories name determined relationships among unchangeable things. They allow us to reduce the data of complex experiences to relevant facts, so that we can apply the theory to those facts and solve our problems. Character is irrelevant to theory. A culture of stories is a culture of people; a culture of theories is a culture of facts and abstract ideas. MacIntyre grew up in a kind of frontier or border situation⁸ between these two cultures.

MacIntyre started college at the age of sixteen:

From

1945

to

1949

I was an undergraduate student in classics at what was then Queen Mary College in the University of London, reading Greek texts of Plato and Aristotle with my teachers, while also, from

1947

onwards, occasionally attending lectures given by A. J. Ayer or Karl Popper, or by visiting speakers to Ayer’s seminar at University College, such as John Wisdom. Early on I had read Language, Truth and Logic, and Ayer’s student James Thomson introduced me to the Tractatus and to Tarski’s work on truth.⁹

In this period, MacIntyre encountered, considered, but rejected Thomism,¹⁰ became a Marxist;¹¹ visited Paris, read Sartre,¹² met Steiner,¹³ and studied social anthropology.¹⁴ In his 2009 autobiographical paper, he explains problems he discovered in his undergraduate education that shaped his early work.¹⁵

The first problem distorted his conception of rational justification. MacIntyre was impressed by the work of Ayer and his students, and he became convinced that the test of any set of philosophical theses, including those defended by Thomists, was whether it could be vindicated in and through the kinds of debates Ayer and his students conducted.¹⁶ MacIntyre also learned that the formal logical resources of contemporary analytic philosophy that governed that kind of debate could not settle substantive disagreements between contending schools of thought.¹⁷ MacIntyre could not vindicate Thomism in the way that seemed necessary, and thus he could not adopt it.¹⁸

The second problem, also related to the rational justification of Thomism, came from Ayer’s agreement with Sartre, that choices produce moral values. Ayer credited Sartre for arguing that practical reasons for actions have only such weight as each of us chooses to give them.¹⁹ Where Thomism taught that the truth about the good or evil of a thing is prior to and independent of anyone’s choices, Ayer and Sartre taught that there are acts of choice, implicit or explicit, that are prior to and determinative of one’s judgments of good and evil.²⁰ How was one to settle this dispute? MacIntyre could not vindicate Thomism philosophically in Ayer’s kind of debate. The alternative might be to choose Thomism arbitrarily; but to choose Thomism without rational justification was to affirm Ayer and Sartre, not Aquinas.²¹ Thus, again, it seemed impossible to adopt Thomism; but neither was it necessary to adopt Ayer’s emotivism.

The third problem arose from MacIntyre’s engagement with Marxism. Marxism, MacIntyre reposts, enabled him to recognize the nature of the dominant contemporary morality.²² Marx and Engels had asserted that some particular social and economic order must be the basis of any given morality, and that moral philosophy interprets and examines that morality either to defend it or to undermine it along with its economic and social order.²³ The moral philosopher, so conceived, is always engaged in conservative or subversive action. MacIntyre therefore asked what task modern moral philosophy performed in relation to the morality of his economic and social order.²⁴ He determined liberal, individualist moral philosophy supported a liberal and individualist social and economic order.

Liberal moral philosophy in the twentieth century was dominated by two contradictory theories: utilitarianism and Kantianism. Utilitarians contended that morality demanded pragmatic choices, weighing all the foreseen consequences of an act,²⁵ favoring the greatest happiness of the greatest number,²⁶ even if that demanded self-sacrifice²⁷ or even, as Ross argued, the punishment of the innocent.²⁸ Kantians rejected utilitarianism; for them, reason demanded the fulfilment of duties prescribed by rational moral principles,²⁹ without any consideration of consequences.³⁰ These theories are contrary to each other; moral consistency requires the rejection of one and commitment to the other. Nevertheless, people regularly overlooked that conflict and alternated between the two theories, applying whichever best served to justify their present course of action. MacIntyre concludes: in many areas of the everyday life of modernity what we find . . . is an oscillation between those two standpoints and a moral rhetoric designed to disguise that oscillation.³¹ The relevant feature of contemporary moral culture was its unacknowledged, ideological use of theory to defend choices supporting the existing liberal and individualist social and economic order. MacIntyre rejected that economic order, its peculiar morality, and the liberal individualist moral philosophy that defended it.

MacIntyre rejected liberalism as a student, when he was fortunate enough . . . to be confronted by the local Communist Party’s critique of the local Labour Party. That critique was compelling in concrete terms.³² My critique of liberalism is one of the few things that has gone unchanged in my overall view throughout my life.³³ Liberalism, for MacIntyre, names the ideology that sees the individual, rather than the family or some other community, as the unit of society. In the theories of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, the individual precedes society; civil society only arises through the choices of individuals.³⁴ Marxists, by contrast, assert that the individual is socially constituted; community precedes the individual.

Liberal individualism is inherently predatory because it makes self-interest the only motive for action. It divides in order to conquer; it liberates the individual from the demands of community life but thus undermines common action and collective resistance, and leaves power as the sole measure of value in a marketplace that treats people and their labor as commodities:

Liberalism, while imposing through state power regimes that declare everyone free to pursue whatever they take to be their own good, deprives most people of the possibility of understanding their lives as a quest for the discovery and achievement of the good, especially by those ways in which it attempts to discredit those traditional forms of human community within which this project has to be embodied.³⁵

American conservatives would more comfortably apply MacIntyre’s assessment to liberal laws and court decisions affecting public morals,³⁶ but laws championed by conservatives protecting the individual laborer’s right-to-work³⁷ are closer to MacIntyre’s concerns.

Jurisprudence³⁸ like the 2018 Janus decision,³⁹ and legislation like the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act⁴⁰ and right-to-work laws in twenty-seven US states, free the individual laborer from the importunities of forced unionism,⁴¹ but at a cost. The AFL-CIO complains, These laws make it harder for working people to form unions and collectively bargain for better wages, benefits and working conditions.⁴² Liberalism promises freedom, and it delivers it to those who have the resources to enjoy it. But for many others, liberalism only undermines the social structures needed for the kind of moral and practical education that could raise them out of proletarian dependence.

For MacIntyre, Marxism brought another dimension to the question of the meaning of moral judgements. Kantians and utilitarians alike saw moral judgments as propositions about objective facts, independent of the choices and desires of individual agents that provided compelling reasons to choose one course of action over another. Emotivists, however, saw moral judgments as nothing but expressions of the subjective preferences, desires, and choices of individual agents, concealed behind a rhetoric of objective norms and obligations. Marxism supports emotivist contentions when it treats moral judgments as rhetorical interventions to support or subvert the social and economic status quo. Thus Marxism returns to the practical question: Are there good reasons to do the things that moralists say we ought to do?

During this period MacIntyre limited his questioning about the meaning and justification of moral claims to the realm of philosophy. His religious beliefs were not open to rational investigation: "For a time I tried to fence off the area of religious belief and practice from the rest of my life, by treating it as a sui generis form of life, with its own standards internal to it, and by blending a particular interpretation of Wittgenstein’s notion of a ‘form of life’ with Karl Barth’s theology."⁴³ As a Christian, MacIntyre took a real interest in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, but he could not justify Thomism rationally. It did not follow that he rejected or even questioned his Christian faith, because his religion was insulated from rational examination by his fideistic theology. The same young MacIntyre who weighed the atheistic philosophical claims of emotivists and existentialists against those of intuitionists and Marxists would publish his first book with a Christian theological press.⁴⁴

Early Career: 1949–1971

In 1991, MacIntyre viewed the early part of his career as a time of poorly organized enquiries.⁴⁵ Yet articulating the meaning and justification of moral judgments already took a central place in his work. His MA thesis and his first book exemplify this focus.

The MA Thesis, The Significance of Moral Judgments (1951)

MacIntyre’s 1951 MA thesis, The Significance of Moral Judgments,⁴⁶ argues that emotivism fails to give a complete account of the meaning of moral judgements. The thesis criticizes Stevenson, whose book, Ethics and Language (1944), had become the standard formulation of emotivist theory, but Ayer⁴⁷ is also a target of the critique.⁴⁸ The first chapter criticizes Moore’s intuitionism and Stevenson’s emotivism as two contrary responses to the same mistaken presupposition, that knowledge of morals must be knowledge of the referential meaning of moral propositions.⁴⁹ The second chapter examines Stevenson’s emotivism, notes its insights, but catalogues its shortcomings.

In the third chapter, MacIntyre takes up a more constructive project. Early in chapter 1, MacIntyre had mentioned Ryle’s distinction made in 1945 between knowing that and knowing how⁵⁰ and Ryle’s argument that, as MacIntyre’s summarizes, we must learn to class with the second many activities which we have been accustomed to class with the first.⁵¹ Chapter 3 brings Ryle’s distinction into focus. To see moral judgement as part of a pattern of behaviour is to bring out the way in which it is an activity. To act morally is to know how to act.⁵²

In chapter 4, MacIntyre argues that moral philosophy should not focus on propositions and their references.⁵³ He argues that we can formulate the sense in which moral judgements have significance by exhibiting the logic of their usage.⁵⁴ He exhibits the logic of their usage by examining four passages from literary works, four narratives, in which fictional characters use moral language to argue in support of moral judgments.

In these four passages, two from Forster, Howard’s End,⁵⁵ one from Koestler, Darkness at Noon,⁵⁶ and one from Sophocles, Antigone,⁵⁷ fictional characters use moral judgments not only to establish what ought to be done, but also to establish the criteria by which claims about what ought to be done ought to be weighed: Moral arguments are not just about the application of the principles, but also about which principles to apply; and not only about the relation of the facts to the judgments, but also about which facts are relevant to our decisions.⁵⁸ Modern moral philosophy does not acknowledge this complexity. It restricts the task of moral philosophy, suggesting that principles are to be applied to the facts,⁵⁹ as if the facts were not the subjects of their own controversies.

Good contemporary fiction, like traditional stories and classical literature, places moral conflict within the realistic complexity of concrete practical reasoning and thus lays a better foundation for moral philosophy than abstract theories. Quoting Lawrence, MacIntyre laments the separation of philosophy and fiction. The two belong together: For moral philosophy cannot ever tell us how moral reasoning is to proceed. That has to be left to the novelist and the dramatist. The moral philosopher can only comment when their work has been done by exhibiting the logic of such reasoning. He resembles the literary critic.⁶⁰ The moral philosopher responds to cultural narratives with probable moral arguments.

The probable arguments of moral philosophy cannot ever provide a sanction that puts anyone’s moral position beyond question,⁶¹ because the request for a sanction for our moral judgements reflects an attempt to escape the ambiguity of our moral situation.⁶² Conscience, even if considered the voice of God, cannot put moral judgments beyond question, because conscience is fallible.⁶³ Nor can socially established moral principles provide such a sanction. If there is to be any sanction for moral judgments it must be practical.

Arguments over actions can only appeal to good practical reasons:

By better or worse reasons we do not mean psychologically more or less effective reasons, but reasons which are judged better or worse in the context of our practical problems. This is not to deny the emotive character of the moral judgment: it is to suggest that when we have said of moral judgements that they are emotive we have left a great deal unsaid—and even the emotive may have a logic to be mapped. Such a logic can never be enunciated in rigorous terms. This is partly because practical problems never recur in quite the same way and partly because morality is not a knowing that but a knowing how.⁶⁴

Moral judgments may have emotive meaning, but they are primarily practical judgments intended to inform practical decisions, and thus they may be judged rationally.

The conclusion of the thesis justifies the definition of moral philosophy and the limited task of moral philosophy that MacIntyre gave in its introduction:

The question for moral philosophy seems to be what we are doing when we thus distinguish between good and bad reasons. It is this kind of approach which we find in the Nicomachean Ethics. Ethics is the science of practical problems. This is not to say that ethics tells us how to solve our moral problems, but it does tell us what kind of a task we are undertaking in attempting to solve them. With this we must be content, and yet moral philosophers in the past have sometimes asked for moral philosophy to do more than this.⁶⁵

Moral philosophy makes judgments about practical reasoning that can be justified by rational argument. MacIntyre had set a course from which he would not waver. Moral philosophy, for MacIntyre, would be a study of practical reasoning and of the habits of judgment that Aristotelians associate with the virtue of prudence.

Marxism: An Interpretation (1953)

MacIntyre’s first book, Marxism: An Interpretation (1953)⁶⁶ is a Christian book that engages Marxism critically and constructively in a time when the atheism of Marxist ideology and the Soviet persecution of the Christian churches convinced most Christians to reject Marxism without examination.⁶⁷ To challenge Christians to consider Marx’s early work, even as they resisted later Marxism, MacIntyre does two things.

First, MacIntyre argues that Marxism can offer modern Christians grounds for reasserting elements of Christianity which had been ignored and obscured by many Christians because Marxism is a transformation of Christianity.⁶⁸ MacIntyre compares Marx’s early critique of alienation and commodification of labor to traditional Christian teachings about justice. MacIntyre also emphasizes Marx’s observations on the socially atomizing character of modern life: Capitalism breaks through the natural communities of an agricultural, subsistence economy, and replaces them with its own communities, the factory and the industrial city.⁶⁹

Second, MacIntyre questions the rational justification of contemporary Marxism. Here MacIntyre distinguishes the early prophetic Marx⁷⁰ from the later scientific—or better, pseudoscientific—Marx.⁷¹ MacIntyre’s book celebrates Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, which he calls by his translation of its German title, National Economy and Philosophy,⁷² and criticizes the dogmatic Marxist orthodoxies derived from Marx’s later works. MacIntyre places the line of demarcation between the prophetic and the scientific periods in Marx’s writing, between the Theses on Feuerbach (Spring 1845) and The German Ideology (Fall 1845–mid 1846).

MacIntyre has cited Marx’s third thesis on Feuerbach throughout his career,⁷³ and he treated the work in detail in a 1994 paper.⁷⁴ He reads the Theses on Feuerbach as a genuinely transitional text,⁷⁵