I first read Alasdair MacIntyre in order to argue with him.

I was midway through my liberal arts undergrad education, and something strange was happening on campus. My friends in the political theory department had all suddenly started using the same turns of phrase—trying out MacIntyrean-flavored quips like “human rights don’t really exist” and “it’s just incommensurability.” Well, I thought, snug as I was in my pre-law cocoon of Enlightenment assumptions, we’ll just see about that. So, out of intellectual spite, I picked up After Virtue.

After Virtue is something of a canonical text among critics of “liberalism.” Like Leo Strauss, MacIntyre insists on a sharp distinction between ancient and modern ways of thinking. As After Virtue contends, the metaphysical-ethical architecture that anchored Western civilization for thousands of years has now basically collapsed, leaving moral and political reasoning shot through with incoherence and frustrated interminability.

Today, when we, as citizens in the public sphere, use words like “goodness” or “justice,” many of us do so in radically divergent ways. This makes our public arguments irresolvable. How could a moral question, like the justice of abortion, ever be resolved when discussants don’t agree on the basic meaning of “justice”? These debates are “incommensurable” in that there are no shared background standards to which interlocutors may both appeal.^[1]

In particular, MacIntyre argues, we’ve accepted root and branch the distinctly modern premise that one cannot derive a moral ought from a metaphysical is. In good Kantian fashion, many of us insist that one can’t read off moral or ethical conclusions from the data of reality—to do so is to commit “the naturalistic fallacy.” This modern reflex is precisely what MacIntyre contests. Throughout After Virtue, MacIntyre argues for rehabilitating an older tradition of moral reasoning centered on purpose and virtue.

Traces of the old tradition are still buried in our speech. When we use phrases like “a good watch,” we implicitly refer to the watch’s functioning or purpose. A “bad watch” fails to tell time; a “good watch” is reliable. There is a purpose—a telos—for which a watch exists, which it may exemplify in better or worse ways.^[2] What MacIntyre argues is that humans are no exception to this rule—though, unlike the average watch, human beings are malleable. In the course of their lives, through repeated practice, human beings may come to cultivate and exemplify the various “virtues” associated with well-ordered human existence. To act courageously for years on end is to become a courageous person—or, better, to become a “person” simpliciter. Human beings were made, in short, to exemplify the virtues.

How did we come to forget this? As MacIntyre sees it, we’ve grown blind to our own histories. Under modernity, we’ve lost awareness of the fact that our reasoning occurs within, and our lives are informed by, a conditioning “tradition” within which our concepts of value and the good life are shaped.^[3] There is, in short, no neutral ground—no view from nowhere.

I’m not ashamed to admit I didn’t “get it.” I found much of MacIntyre’s argument abstruse, and struggled to connect it to contemporary controversies. Even if I agree with him, what’s the point? We’re all classical liberals now, aren’t we? In particular, I found the book’s conclusion, in which MacIntyre puts a philosophical choice to the reader—will you side with Aristotle’s teleology, or Nietzsche’s will to power?—overdrawn. Weren’t there other options than this? So off to law school I went, haunted by MacIntyre’s argument but not quite willing to follow him.

I wouldn’t escape so easily. A few months later, during a conversation with the theologian Stanley Hauerwas (no, I didn’t learn a lot of “law” at my “law school”), I mentioned I’d read After Virtue and that it didn’t really click for me. Read the other ones in the “Virtue Trilogy,” Hauerwas encouraged me. MacIntyre had a lot more to say.^[4] So, a year or so later, I stayed up late into the night reading Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, the second volume in MacIntyre’s unofficial trilogy.

If After Virtue was polemical, WJWR is more historical, comparing and contrasting a broad range of Western traditions of moral reasoning from Aristotle to Hume. This time around, I understood MacIntyre’s argument rather better. And I was on his side. After all, the basic principles of teleology seemed like an inevitable corollary of the classical theism I’d recently come to take more seriously. If all created reality participates in God as its Source, then surely every aspect of created reality “carries within” itself some orientation to its Creator, and growth in “virtue” is a way of expressing, from a different direction, the possibility of ever-fuller human participation in the gift of being.

But still, it seemed to me, WJWR ended on a decidedly dissatisfying note. MacIntyre had persuasively identified rival traditions of rationality and moral reasoning, but without providing much of a criterion for mediating between them. It seemed to me that we were left with incommensurability, consigned to a world of dueling narratives.

Time passed, and many of my friends and acquaintances began intellectually flirting with aggressively antiliberal forms of political order, like Catholic “integralism.” Many of them cited MacIntyre’s work as their inspiration. After all, wasn’t something like this the logical political outgrowth of the “incommensurability” thesis?^[5] Not only had modernity failed, but MacIntyre had successfully proved that there was no possibility of common ground with one’s moral or intellectual opponents. (The great irony of this reasoning, of course, was its de facto insistence on the will-to-power logic that MacIntyre’s project defined itself against. The world needs Aristotle in the sheets, but Nietzsche in the streets?)

Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, Tradition is likely one of MacIntyre’s least-read books. To my mind, though, it is one of the most important. Over the course of the volume, MacIntyre surveys three different approaches to rationality and moral reasoning—Enlightenment liberalism, the “genealogical” or historicizing tendency running from Nietzsche through Foucault and others, and the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition. But in its closing pages, MacIntyre pushes beyond After Virtue or WJWR, arguing for the possibility—however faint—of true mediation across deep difference. Not merely do rival traditions exist in opposition to the classical tradition; rather, each rival finds itself “drawing its necessary sustenance from that which it professes to have discarded.”^[6]

Here is a breakthrough—a recognition that, even within disordered and flawed approaches to moral reasoning that attempt to reject Reality itself, something transcendent is still operative, some flicker of grace that cracks through the logic of rival intellectual systems. Incommensurability is never absolute, but provisional. Or, as St. Augustine put it far more elegantly: our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee. That means all of our hearts, irrespective of our conditioning traditions.

This is a logic grounded in the reality of common humanity—which must be the presupposition, after all, of any good teleology. It is a logic that cannot help but defuse any Manichaean readings of MacIntyre’s project, as a warrant for a Schmittian politics of annihilation. And it is a logic that came to pervade MacIntyre’s late-career work.

In Dependent Rational Animals, MacIntyre takes up Aristotle’s conception of humanity and presses beyond it, arguing that moral reasoning must properly account for the realities of birth, death, and contingency, apart from which we’d have few opportunities to exemplify the virtues. Here is the philosophical ground of a principle of compassion that transcends Aristotle’s own moral conclusions, moving—just like MacIntyre himself over the course of his life—deeper and deeper into the specifically Christian tradition.

Ethics in the Conflict of Modernity, the philosopher’s final book,draws together the strands of MacIntyre’s lifelong work, summarizing central themes but taking one step further still—moving from the high theory that so vexed me in After Virtue, into illustration of concrete practices. Practical reasoning, and the exemplification of virtue it entails, is not an abstract ideological project, but something to be worked out over the course of—always very different—human lives. For MacIntyre in ECM, the lives surveyed range from Trinidadian socialist author C.L.R. James to U.S. Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor. And the diversity of these lives, in the end, reflects the fact that no life well lived can escape the Good always operant within the finite goods of human experience. On that note, MacIntyre’s book concludes with a passage that is nothing short of marvelous:

The perfection and completion of a life consists in an agent’s having persisted in moving toward and beyond the best goods of which he or she knows. So there is presupposed some further good, an object of desire beyond all particular and finite goods, a good toward which desire tends insofar as it remains unsatisfied by even the most desirable of finite goods, as in good lives it does. But here the enquiries of politics and ethics end. Here natural theology begins.^[7]

At the end of MacIntyre’s lifelong quest, and at the end of all politics and ethics, waits the God from whom all good things flow, in an act of unmerited love—the God before whom we poor sinners are, indeed, merely “dependent rational animals.” Politics and ethics logically pass into theology—into grace.

MacIntyre’s work is not always easy to read. But it is that rarest of things—philosophy that, over time, transforms one’s way of seeing life. The decisions of everyday life are decisions I now make with consciousness of the Christian tradition I work within, and that I steward every time I tell my children about right and wrong and Jesus. Recognition, though, is only the beginning—MacIntyre’s approach is not merely descriptive, but normative. His work stresses that those accumulated decisions, over time, form the arc of the narrative of my human life, and form the person I will become not tomorrow, but years from now.

Those moral choices are worked out within relationships of dependence—relationships foregrounded every day for me by my young sons (ages 2 and 4 at the time I write this). They are living reminders that, years ago, I depended upon my parents who brought me into the world and nurtured me. And, closing the loop, I, too, will one day grow old (God willing) and need care. This dependence—both our immanent dependence upon one another, and our transcendent dependence upon the Creator in whom we live and move and have our being— is not merely accidental to my and my son’s humanity. Rather, that dependence is constitutive of it. I’m reminded here of Martin Luther’s famous words on the privilege of changing diapers:

[Christian faith says] “I confess to thee that I am not worthy to rock the little babe or wash its diapers. or to be entrusted with the care of the child and its mother. How is it that I, without any merit, have come to this distinction of being certain that I am serving thy creature and thy most precious will?”^[8]

On a MacIntyrean reading, Luther is precisely right. To be human—to have the privilege of developing the virtues, through all the vicissitudes and choices of ordinary life, life lived in dependence—is an incalculable gift.

Few have seen that gift more brilliantly than Alasdair MacIntyre, who now in glory enjoys it all the more.

Image: Sean O’Connor, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

[1] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 6-11.

[2] MacIntyre, After Virtue, 57-58.

[3] MacIntyre, After Virtue, 220-25.

[4] For more on this, see John Ehrett, “Chuck Colson’s Last Word,” First Things (Apr. 8. 2025), https://firstthings.com/chuck-colsons-last-word/.

[5] For more on this point, see John Ehrett, “The Forgotten Post-Liberals,” Athwart (June 14, 2013), https://www.athwart.org/the-forgotten-post-liberals-theonomists-integralists/.

[6] Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 215.

[7] Alasdair MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 315.

[8] Martin Luther, “The Estate of Marriage” (1522), trans. Walther I. Brandt, https://lutherancatechism.com/doc-lib/luther_m_the_estate_of_marriage_1522.pdf.