After Virtue: Book Review and Contentions

The following is a Book Review on Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, written for a Philosophy of Social Science class at Princeton

Part I: A Wide-Angle View of After Virtue

Few books can claim to radically alter the landscape of an entire discipline; fewer yet become necessary companions for the study of that discipline thereafter. In the case of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, a singular work may achieve both of these distinctions. One need not necessarily agree with MacIntyre, but in order to enter the space of modern moral philosophy one is required to at least reckon with the Scottish philosopher. In fact I am tempted to say that one must wrestle through the argumentation of After Virtue itself, as it represents MacIntyre’s foundational framework for moral philosophy and remains a seminal read on the subject. We will embark on that very wrestling here today.

MacIntyre’s entire project can be boiled down to a few central arguments. The first is that with the onset of modernity the study of morality became completely fragmented, perhaps even irreparably. The second claim is that this philosophical cataclysm finds its roots in the Enlightenment, which we must understand in order to see where the problem arose. Lastly MacIntyre suggests that in order to regain any semblance of ethical order back, humanity may be best served returning to an Aristotelian model of virtues. For our purposes here today, we will be focusing in on those first two arguments; however, we must lay out the work as a whole before entering into that more focused discussion.

The basic structure of After Virtue can be broken down (in a classic MacIntyrian fashion) into two fundamental parts – the issue, and the solution. The issue is covered in the first nine chapters of the book, where the author describes how the way we speak about morality has been disconnected from our actual understanding of morality. The “grammars” we use in moral dialogue are Aristotelian in nature, but we have clung to a modern understanding of morality. This issue presupposes the Enlightenment’s supremacy, but does not adjust its grammar accordingly. MacIntyre goes through the lineage of moral thought within the Enlightenment, finally asking the question in chapter nine: “Nietzsche or Aristotle?” (109). Modernity has picked the former, but MacIntyre decides to explore the moral system of the latter. The last half of the book, then, is an investigation into the lineage and value of Aristotelian virtue ethics. Part of this discussion includes the development of moral traditions in the ancient world, as well as an account of communities and engagement with recent thinkers like Rawls, Sartre, and Nozick. MacIntyre finally comes to the conclusion that we are not waiting for Godot (a reference to Samuel Beckett’s play wherein two men fumble around with ineffectual purposelessness and moral incertitude while waiting for a phantom “Godot” to meet them) but a new St. Benedict (263). He mentions this in reference to the Catholic Saint’s decisive action in the face of the moral uncertainty of the “dark ages”; this revolution of values and moral framework may be the only way to save humanity from the “disquieting suggestion” he puts forward in chapter 1 about the future prospects of moral discourse.

We will continue to engage the book in its entirety later on, but for now our scope for review will be limited to the first five chapters. With a wide-angle understanding of MacIntyre’s argument in place, we can now turn specifically to the beginning portion of the book to understand what I describe as the first fundamental part of his argument, where he lays out the issue of how we stumbled into the current ethical situation at all.

Part II: Reviewing Chapters 1-5 of After Virtue

What is the current ethical situation though? In order to understand that question, the first chapter asks the reader to enter a hypothetical scenario wherein the natural sciences “were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe” of sorts (1). In this scenario, MacIntyre suggests an alternate world in which some massive environmental disasters were to be blamed on scientists, and that as a fallout of such a massive disaster the population rejects the natural sciences as a valid methodology for deducing truth. As a result, pandemonium ensues: scientists are executed, scientific instruments are destroyed, and institutions of science such as laboratories and schools are burned to the ground. The image perhaps can be likened to the sack of Rome, or the burning of the Alexandrian library – complete and utter iconoclastic bedlam. The author then prompts us to imagine that, as a reaction to this movement years later, a group of people tried to recover science as it was before the calamity. This group reads the half-torn pages of the textbooks, and examines the still charred equipment so as to deduce their proper meanings and functions. Eventually, they begin to teach the natural sciences again.

But there is a problem. Because of the destruction of scientific discovery’s historical canon, the entire project is not the actual study of these subjects, but merely an incomplete and referential knowledge to the theorems that came before. One can try to learn Einstein’s theory of general relativity, but without the context of, say, Newtonian physics, how can one make real sense of the idea? The idea is disjointed from its necessary context.

Alasdair MacIntyre

So then the debates in this hypothetical world would become obscured. No one would be able to agree exactly on the premises of the discussions of science and thus, humanity would be lost without even knowing it. Their pursuit of science would be all for naught, but they would march on anyway as if they were speaking sense.

Now, why does MacIntyre take the first two pages of After Virtue setting up this elaborate scenario? Well, because he believes that this very thing has happened with the study of morals. On page 2 he suggests the following:

“In the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world which I described. What we possess, if this is true, are fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed a simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have – very largely, if not entirely – lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality” (2).

Here we see the core of what MacIntyre sees as the problem that no one in the field of ethics has really come to terms with. Yes, humans still call upon the language of morality; and yes, they still make a sort of moral judgements. But MacIntyre believes that these moral grammars, if you will, have been detached from their philosophical lineage. This reality is further accentuated by the fact that history itself (told in the way it is told today) sees its retelling of the history of moral discourse as value-neutral, when that retelling is in actuality actually quite affected by the premises of modernity (4). Ethics desperately wants to use the same words as we have used in the past, but the modern understandings of those words are incomplete remnants of those words’ historical meaning. MacIntyre ends the first chapter with the suggestion that, despite his assertion that modern moral grammar is scrambled, warped, and perhaps even irrecoverable, we mustn’t succumb to such nihilism, but rather attempt to understand the problem.

After Virtue’s second chapter focuses on the very nature of moral disagreement in the modern world. MacIntyre frames the discussion with a statement that nearly every person living in modern Western society can agree with: “There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture” (6). To illustrate the point, the author even provides contemporary issues with which one can recognize the similar appeals, or grammars, being used to argue. The issue he sees is that while those grammars are similar in composition, they are more or less arbitrary because they derive their authority from different places. Some people, or situations, call on agents to do certain things because of relationships: If my superior tells me to do something, I do it, because the personal context defines what is wrong and right. However, other times individuals appeal to some sort of “impersonal criteria” in order to define moral action – perhaps it is a phrase such as “duty” that binds someone, or a philosophy of utilitarianism (9). Regardless, these are the types of moral utterances that we encounter often, but never parse out the question of authority on.

MacIntyre is deeply interested in the notion that words change in meaning over time, but our evaluation of them often situates the claims in modernity rather than its own context. It’s true of words like “justice” – which we now have a relatively fluid understanding of, but in the past was defined a bit differently. That context, he argues, is crucial. MacIntyre expands this reasoning out to philosophical systems as well – what he calls an “unhistorical treatment” of contemporary philosophy. For example, the inclination to take the words of David Hume as completely disembodied notions is wrong according to MacIntyre. History and ideas go hand in hand, and when we decouple them, we lose part of the truth of those statements. The author thinks we must recover these histories alongside the moral philosophies to understand their true merits, as well as their failings.

From here MacIntyre launches into a full-scale investigation into the predominant moral system of the day: Emotivism. On pages 11-12, MacIntyre defines emotivism as “The doctrine that all evaluative judgements and more specifically all moral judgements are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character” (11-12). The sentiment should not be foreign to any American or British readers; in fact it’s precisely the reason that MacIntyre believes that no one can achieve moral agreement. If one’s emotions or preferences differ from another’s, then of course there will be no such agreement! How could there be?

MacIntyre discusses his disagreements with emotivism in the second half of chapter two and all through the third chapter. I will run through those issues here now. His first contention is that emotivism allows an utterances’ use and meaning to become inseparable, which in turn conceals the meaning of the utterance at all. It presupposes that when one says something, the words themselves can be understood as some constant assertion across contexts. The obvious problem with this is that an utterance cannot stand on its own feet the same way in every circumstance; the words of a sentence cannot tell the whole story of what is being said. A schoolmaster may tell a boy the answer to a math equation calmly, or he may scream it at the student – these of course mean two different things, but the utterance’s words have not changed (14). For MacIntyre, emotivism does not allow for this change in meaning to occur – the sentiment is the words themselves, which further distorts the relationship between moral utterances and moral language. Another critique comes by way of emotivism being likened to soft utilitarianism, a commitment to the “greatest good” outcome framework but passed through the radically subjective lens of the self. That too, MacIntyre disagrees with (on page fifteen here but at length later on, in chapter six). Finally he describes how, despite emotivists believing they appeal to an objective, rational standard, they never achieve one. This is because the nature of emotivist thought is too fluid; if the authoritative source of moral utterances truly is rooted in preference, then “every attempt…to provide a rational justification for an objective morality has in fact failed” (19).

MacIntyre believes that emotivism has become so fundamental to our culture that it touches nearly every inch of our social fabric without us even perceiving it. Its assumptions about sociology have given rise to myths, such as that of the bureaucratic authority and managerial effectiveness (27, expanded on in chapter 8). Emotivism tacitly champions manipulation as the best argumentative method, prompting the author to boldly proclaim later on that “the most effective bureaucrat is the best actor” (107).

Chapter four begins MacIntyre’s investigation into the root historical contexts of our moral situation which, he sees as stuck between emotivism and hardcore logical positivism. He begins this exploration by saying that we in the modern world have more or less misunderstood the enlightenment as a French episode when it should be thought of as a Northern European one – specifically a Scottish, English, and Dutch phenomena. This must be, he asserts in part, because of the secularized Protestant history of these places (37). MacIntyre suggests that the “traditional distinction between the religious and aesthetic has been blurred” (38). He believes that the issue can be epitomized in the shift from Latin to English, which he expands upon by showing the evolution of the concept of “morality” etymologically.

MacIntyre moves into the thrust of his argument about the scrambling/fragmentation of morals by honing in on the Enlightenment as the turning point. To do so, he walks the reader through the history of moral philosophy step by step, starting with Kierkegaard and moving backwards. To MacIntyre, Kierkegaard breaks the locus of ethics down to the concept of “choice” – between what he calls the “aesthetic” and the “ethical”. “The paradigm of aesthetic expression is the romantic lover who is immersed in his own passion,” MacIntyre writes, “By contrast the paradigm of the ethical is marriage, a state of commitment and obligation through time” (40). Kierkegaard envisions the former as a perhaps more whimsical, impulsive life, where the other is built on more rigid and unchanging foundations. One’s choice between the two, though, is arbitrary.

Both options are based on “choice” according to MacIntyre, however each option derives its authority from wholly different places. Nevertheless he still sees Kierkegaard’s conception of the moral situation as primarily informed by, and reacting to, Kant’s, saying that the latter “sets the philosophical scene” for the former on page 43; Here he breaks down Kantian logical positivism in order to elucidate its effect on modernity.

For Kant, feelings cannot be the locus of morality, because emotivism is too volatile. Likewise religious beliefs cannot hold such power, because humans cannot know that God’s morality is correct without a standard by which they could judge God’s moral system. Finally Kant settles on rational thought as being the basis of our moral standards, completely antithetical to Hume’s skeptical empiricism put forward not many years before.

Before moving on, I must mention how MacIntyre identifies Kant and Kierkegaard as splitting points in the relationship between “happiness” (in an Aristotelian virtue sense, much deeper than just feeling happy) and morality. In doing so the author sets the stage for his discussion of what functionally boils down to Kant opposing emotivism on page 46. That at last, brings us to one of the most revelatory passages in the entire book thus far – where MacIntyre identifies the origins of what we now might call existentialism. I will simply quote from page 47 to make this point:

“Kierkegaard and Kant agree in their conception of morality, but Kierkegaard inherits that conception together with an understanding that the project of giving a rational vindication of morality has failed. Kant’s failure provided Kierkegaard with his starting-point: the act of choice had to be called in to do the work that reason could not do… Kant’s project was a historical response to their [Diderot and Hume’s] failure just as Kierkegaard’s was to his” (47).

So then MacIntyre functionally sets the stage as such: Hume advocates for an empirically-based, almost emotionally driven moral system in response to his time. Kant identified for himself inconsistencies with both empiricist and religious thought, championing reason as the sole arbiter of morality. Kierkegaard agrees with these premises implicitly, and even furthers them by describing a world wherein we “choose” between impulsivism and structure (the aforementioned images of romantic love sagas vs marriages to represent these two schools of thought).

Whether one chooses the romantic love saga or the sturdy assuredness and structure of marriage is an arbitrary decision according to Kierkegaard. MacIntyre sees Kierkegaard as building from Kant’s failure to comprehensively absolutize rationality, and subsequently we are left with “choice”, not rationality, as our final resting place. Thus we come upon a nonsensical dichotomy between modernism and fundamentalism. They’re both illogical to MacIntyre (and Kant for that matter). But as a result of Hume and Kant’s failures to sufficiently describe the philosophical situation, Kierkegaard’s “choice” system puts agency in the modern person’s hands to decide for themselves. Thus, we witness here the birth of what would come to be known as existentialism – giving the person themself more “control” over their existence than ever.

If chapter four provides a set of assertions about the history of analytic philosophy, chapter five sets out to prove those assertions put forward by examining the logic of those arguments themselves. This starts with reaffirming that the 18th century philosophers inherited a shared historical background that preordained the internal incoherence to their moral systems. On page 52 MacIntyre puts is as such:

Any project of this form was bound to fail, because of an ineradicable discrepancy between their shared conception of moral rules and precepts on the one hand and what was shared – despite much larger divergences – in their conception of human nature on the other hand” (52).

This quote frames the discussion moving forward quite well: What then are these Enlightenment thinkers’ shared conception of moral rules? And what did they likewise believe about human nature? And why do these bring about an internal lapse in logic?

Well, MacIntyre points out that before the Enlightenment morality required a sort of telos; that is, a purpose or meaning that is greater than ones’ self. Because of this shift we can come to (and I will simplify it here because it’s a bit hard to follow in the book) the following implied precepts of the modern Aristotelian moral scheme laid out on page 53:

1. Humans are confused morally

2. But we know that we can be more moral; we can grow to be better.

3. Humans can progress toward that potential through practical reason and experience

For MacIntyre, anti-Aristotelian science (read: the Enlightenment project) sets strict boundaries on reason. It can only speak of means, and never ends; only of process, never of goals themselves (54). Thus, all of the Enlightenment moral thinkers, being products of the Enlightenment mode of thought, see moral reasoning as being vitally about process; it can be achieved, like science, with no understanding of a telos outside of the constitutive truth that comes about.

This method is required when trying to deduce scientific or mathematical truth. Having a desired outcome for a science experiment will surely taint the integrity of the experiment itself. Imagine if scientists decided the outcome of the experiment before testing it, then rigged the experiment to achieve the desired outcome – it’s simply not how scientific study is conducted! But can the same scientific method be applied to moral philosophy? MacIntyre is a bit skeptical. Just as Kant believed that purely religious moral systems cannot be checked against any absolute standard (think of fundamentalism), there is no authority to check any ethical processes put forward by these philosophers. It’s this lack of validation that Kant can point out as an issue in Hume’s methodology, but cannot see in his own.

This confusion left moral philosophy in a bind, as it would seem philosophers put a lot of trust in the coherence of their process without being able to properly define what was good about them at all. The process was good inherently, to Hume and Kant, thus the whatever output the system creates was morally justifiable. This poses big problems for MacIntyre, who maintains that without a telos, the scheme is required to produce “good” without an understanding of what “good” is. Therefore a “moral” person is not one that produces what we might call “moral actions” but instead one that abides most often by the processes set out by the moral philosophers: For Kant, it means abiding by the process of the rigid rationality of the Categorial Imperative; For Hume, it means following the whimsy of the passions. MacIntyre shakes his head; of course this cannot work because in both instances the process oftentimes produces what we could call “bad morals”. Hume and Kant’s competing schema, although vastly different methodologies, remain rooted in fundamentally similar injunctions about methodology’s value itself, and thus produce similar effects.

Followers of Hume will be thrown with the wind on their passions, leading to morally reprehensible decisions based in the tyranny of an emotional state – but so long as the process is obeyed, then nothing is actually immoral. The fundamentalists, likewise, would say that immorality is the fault of the human, not the moral process: Any moral questions can be answered by simply understanding the word of the law in its entirety, and abiding perfectly. Finally, following the Categorial Imperative can also lead to heinous things, as it requires any moral action to be moral in every circumstance; Kant’s system too demands systematic consistency, not results. In fact none of the aforementioned systems have anything to do with the end (or, telos) of a moral act… they only require coherence to the prescribed ethical process.

Thus we have the conundrum wherein moral philosophers are trying to authorize moral action to achieve “good” ends without any definition for “good” that exists outside of the notion that “my system works”. Their systems presupposed something about humanity (roughly speaking, that goodness and badness exists) without a telos (an overarching definition of what goodness or badness actually are). MacIntyre believes that in the 18th century moral philosophy detached from telos, yet maintained the grammar of right and wrong as if the telos remained intact. This, as he says on page 56, is a grave mistake: Once one detaches morality from a teleological scheme of goodness that you no longer have morality, or at least its composition is intensely changed (56).

Trying to save the reader from obscure abstraction, MacIntyre gifts us a metaphor to drive home this point: A watch is defined in relation to its purpose… a “good watch” is the watch which tells time correctly. The same goes for a farmer – what ought to be a farmer is what a good farmer is (58). The terms are defined by their function, and their goodness is dependent on how closely they resemble the established telos for what that thing is supposed to resemble.

Now, everyone may agree that good watch tells time well, but it’s not so clear with a human. Can we say that a goodhuman exists at all? Why is MacIntyre so sure that humans have an inherent telos? The short answer is that, well, he isn’t necessarily so sure either… at least not here. His aims in this portion of the text are to show that the Enlightenment philosophers imply a telos in the way they talk about morality (“good human”), but try to detach it from a teleological source (like God, or Aristotle’s Good) at all by relying on methodology wherein goodness depends on the methodology of moral discernment itself. He wants to show that the logic is incoherent; He is not proving that “goodness” exists here, but only pointing out the linguistic dissonance between the notion of “goodness” as a moral category and how we use the word itself. The implication then seems to be for MacIntyre that if morality truly exists, then some telos must too. On page 60 he expands on the concept, saying:

“Moral judgements were at once hypothetical and categorical in form… They were hypothetical insofar as they expressed a judgement as to what conduct would be teleologically appropriate… Categorical insofar as they reported the contents of the universal law commanded by God…”

Without these two enjoined premises, moral language as we know it does not make coherent sense. If we are to speak about morality in any meaningful way, we must acknowledge our dependence on a telos, just as Aristotle and Aquinas required for their own truth claims.

To conclude this portion of my goals with this section: We have now laid out a comprehensive (perhaps even too comprehensive, I fear) outline of After Virtue’s first five chapters. We have identified what MacIntyre sees as the issue with modern moral discourse; We have located the movements within philosophical history wherein our moral language became scrambled; We have analyzed the internal issues of these philosophies in order to see where they fail. Now we will move into my personal evaluation and critiques of the text as a whole.

Part II: Evaluation and Contentions

For this section I will begin with what I see as the strengths of After Virtue. The book’s first half is unshakingly solid in identifying the issues themselves with the scrambling of moral discourse. I contend that chapters four and five in particular describe some of the clearest and most concise framings of the root issues with morality in western modernity. The historical approach MacIntyre takes is stunningly effective in revealing key issues with discourse about modern ethics. Followed through to chapter nine, the author tracks the issue all the way to Nietzsche, dovetailing that discussion seamlessly with the onset of modernity before pulling the reader into the Classical period for much of the second half of the book. This first portion of the text I distinguish as the finest argumentation of the entire work.

While the fullness of its significance remains partially unanswered (as I will mention soon), I likewise see the general thrust of chapter one’s hypothetical scenario as brilliantly framing the work. The robust image of the modern moral moment that MacIntyre depicts provides the reader a visceral understanding of a situation that could be otherwise obscured quite easily with lofty philosophical language. From there the work eases the reader calmly and incisively.

There are many other things to be praised about the work, and I personally am convinced by much of the argumentation found within it; however I want to leave room to discuss what I see as the shortcomings of the work – those points where revolutionary moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre missed the mark and where I, a lowly Princeton Master’s student, saw the real truth of the situation (I apologize for my facetiousness, but how else does one frame their critique of such a seminal work?).

My primary concern with After Virtue is whether MacIntyre himself is not falling into a similar trap as those whose arguments he so eloquently dismantled in chapters four and five. I mean this not in the sense that MacIntyre blunders in a similar way to Hume, Kant, and Kierkegaard; of course he avoids the logical inconsistency between moral grammars and telos. My contention comes rather by way of whether or not he solved the issues that all of them could not. The history of morals and the impact of modernity needed to be examined… but does he give a sufficient account for the Aristotelian method as the best solution? I’m not so sure.

Let me explain. MacIntyre correctly points out that we utilize moral grammars without telos; however his solution is that we recover some semblance of telos instead of abandoning the pre-modern grammars. This by no means is a disagreement with this decision, but one must call it what it is: an act of hope. In the wake of these revelations, the options available then are to abandon the grammars themselves, or to renew the teleological framework. MacIntyre never quite brings to light why he decides to do the latter. In my estimation, MacIntyre is unable to address this contention because he possesses insufficient language for hope. For this reason I see After Virtue as terrified, or perhaps even unaware (at least at the time of its writing), that it is explicitly theological. The author’s reliance on Aristotle and the Classical tradition proves this fact, pointing to Aristotle as the potential liberator from the modern moral situation without any explanation for why we should not just abandon the language of morality altogether. That reason is hope, the notion that perhaps we can find moral footing, and that it would even be good to do so! It’s what MacIntyre implies, even if he does not say it outright.

MacIntyre hints at a theological solution in the second portion of the book, but merely on sociological grounds. While he calls upon Christian grammars (especially his final invocation for a new St. Benedict), he views this through an explicitly non-theological lens; that is, he starts from the bottom and works up to a Christian grammar – still never really accounting for why one should have hope at all. Even MacIntyre more or less admits these limitations in the prologue to the third addition, saying “Aquinas was in some respects a better Aristotelian than Aristotle”. I interpret MacIntyre’s words here to mean that Aquinas is afforded the theological language to wrap around a comprehensive telos, and a reason to believe in that telos, that Aristotle never quite achieved outside of the polis… Aquinas has a more elaborate framework for hope. Aristotle presupposed that life was worth living and that moral action is worth striving for in reference to the polis; modernity does no such thing. In describing traditions, MacIntyre seems to believe that a shared telos of sorts is required for moral agreement. Philosopher Peter Johnson picks up on this point in his essay Reclaiming the Aristotelian Ruler, where he locates MacIntyre’s claim that the polis context is long gone, and thus a new teleological scheme must be implemented for moral coherence; However, as Johnson points out, After Virtue has insufficiently supplied a renewed teleological scheme with Aristotle (53-55). I see this detail as crucial in explaining MacIntyre’s famously becoming a Thomist as his later thought unfolds – Aquinas’ theology in many respects can be seen as the expansion of Aristotelian thought to include the Catholic teleological framework. Aquinas’ biology is able to expand the scope of Aristotelianism and account for far more.

A slightly related but distinct point can be made that MacIntyre does not sufficiently engage non-Western thought systems. On the surface, the exclusion of other systems makes sense: the Greeks provide the philosophical lineage for Christianity and Europe, conditions that most of the philosophers that MacIntyre engages with are operating within. One of the results of this decision, though, is a potential overreliance of Western thought in a way that makes the pre-modern West seem like a skeleton key for unlocking the secrets of global moral discourse. MacIntyre sees Aristotle’s poignancy lying in the teleological methodology which produces intelligible moral reasoning – he finds no need to totalize the Greek historical location and culture itself. However it’s reasonable, then, to raise why the author did not engage any Eastern sources, even in passing. Was it for the sake of speaking a coherent American-European moral grammar? Or rather does MacIntyre find no need for other cultures or traditions to engage his work because they were not scathed by the Enlightenment in the same way that the West was?

The decision to limit his scope is never sufficiently explained, and thus opens a floodgate of valid criticisms that After Virtue does little for, or perhaps even disregards, non-Western systems. No nods are ever given to those parts of the world whose moral philosophy remains rather unmarred by the Enlightenment, an achievement that one might commend considering what MacIntyre sees as the gravity of the modern moral dilemma. Now, to this point MacIntyre would certainly have contentions to such an acknowledgement along the lines that a shared “tradition” requires shared historical frameworks. This is then to say that other traditions should not receive credit for not being affected by the Enlightenment if they were never actually bothered by it in the same way that Europe was.

To that point, however, I would contend that the Enlightenment has affected the whole of global ethics in an inextricable way due to the legacies of colonialism and economic globalization. The interconnectedness of the globalized world was carried forth in large part by the West. An undeniable result of this was not only a material colonialism, but the coloniality of thought systems that were imposed on the non-Western world by implication. In this light, those traditions whom resisted Western Enlightenment principles in their ethics deserve discussion, and perhaps further treatment, because their tradition now includes reckoning with the Enlightenment whether they wanted to or not. With this framing, their resistance to abandoning teleological frameworks could be seen as exemplary. None of this can be discussed in After Virtue, though, because the of the work’s narrow and explicitly Western boundaries.

Finally, MacIntyre’s poignant hypothetical scenario in Chapter 1 contains an implication that is never quite addressed in the work. In the scenario, he compares the hypothetical loss of scientific grammar with the loss of moral grammar. However, grammar and knowledge are not comparable in a one-to-one sense. Is MacIntyre suggesting, in his hypothetical scenario, that the issue is how people speak about science after the catastrophe? Or is his issue with the loss of the scientific knowledge itself? If it's the latter, the progression of the book must imply that the Aristotelian framework is in some way an objective truth in the same way that scientific methods are; they are something good that we must recover. However, a main thrust of his arguments in chapters four and five are about how morality cannot be evaluated in the same way that science is if it is to resemble “morality” at all. If MacIntyre’s issue is with the scrambling of moral grammar, then it would seem sufficient to stop the book after the initial arguments are followed through. I am not alone in this critique; Charles Taylor records a similar sentiment in his essay Justice After Virtue, asking of the work, “Is the substantive ethical vision which spawned the false meta-ethic to be just abandoned, or can/ought it to be rescued in some form?” (23). MacIntyre never answers this question, instead only implying the solution by plunging into Aristotelianism.

This plunge brings about two things. First, he champions the Aristotelian methodology on the basis that it more perfectly aligns with our moral language. This makes discussing morality easier within a tradition; however, it still tells us nothing of securing moral agreement across cultures. He decries the label in the prologue, but I consider the implications of After Virtue to be at least somewhat communitarian for this reason (xiv). Secondly, because MacIntyre fixates on the issue of moral grammar, his solution can only ever be to solve how we talk about morality within groups that share moral language. In some senses, then, he accepts the conditions of modernity philosophically; MacIntyre never decries systems such as emotivism as wrong, merely linguistically self-defeating. Drawing on his hypothetical scenario in chapter one, then: Is the issue that the people have fragmented understandings of science? Or that they lack the grammars to talk about science? It would seem as though, even if the first question is answered in the affirmative, only the second question is directly taken up in After Virtue. The author insists he is merely after linguistic coherence, but the implications that he makes thereafter speak to a greater cause.

Does MacIntyre desire for us to change our moral systems, or merely how we speak about morality? As with all of these issues, his later work seems to address that question more directly, but the author leaves these stronger claims unaddressed in After Virtue beyond subtle implications. This, however, returns me to my primary concern about the lack of language around the notion of telos outside of its Greek context, which also links to this book’s reluctance to engage these issues theologically. A broader teleological scheme, expanded perhaps to include other traditions, would allow for MacIntyre to address the issues of morality directly rather than settling on issues of grammatical coherence. These exclusions make sense considering MacIntyre’s intellectual commitments at the time, but certainly leave After Virtue itself incomplete.

Thus ends my premiere and comprehensive critique of the most important work of moral philosophy in centuries. From here my goals will be to fill in all of the holes that MacIntyre lazily missed, and subsequently overtake him as the most important moral philosopher of our time. I am indebted to his work for my future musings, but I must of course bid him adieu once I receive a Nobel Peace Prize for curing the moral quandaries of the 21st century that he attempted to fix on his own. Do not fret, though; I have not forgotten his meager contributions to the discipline, and will make sure to invite him to the afterparty for such an occasion.

Works Cited

Johnson, Peter. “Reclaiming the Aristotelian Ruler.” After MacIntyre: Critical Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, edited by John Horton and Susan Mendus, Polity, Cambridge, 2007, pp. 53–55.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 3rd ed., University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.

MacIntyre, Alasdair. “After Virtue after a Quarter of a Century.” After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana, 2007, pp. x-xiv

Taylor, Charles. “Justice After Virtue.” After MacIntyre: Critical Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, edited by John Horton and Susan Mendus, Polity, Cambridge, 2007, p. 23.