Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre,  (born Jan. 12, 1929, Glasgow, Scot.), Scottish-born philosopher, one of the great moral thinkers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, well known for reintroducing Aristotelian ethics and politics into mainstream philosophy and for emphasizing the role of history in philosophical theorizing.

MacIntyre received a bachelor’s degree in classics from the University of London (1949) and master’s degrees in philosophy from Manchester University (1951) and the University of Oxford (1961). He taught at several universities in Britain and the United States (where he immigrated in 1970), including Oxford, Boston University, Vanderbilt University, Duke University, and the University of Notre Dame. He retired in 2010.

Encounter with Marxism

MacIntyre’s early political allegiances and early scholarly work were oriented toward Marxism. (He published Marxism: An Interpretation [1953] when he was 24 years old.) But he became unsettled by what he took to be the inability of Marxists to respond cogently in moral terms to outrages perpetrated in nominally Marxist regimes. Given the Marxist critique of morality as ideological, upon what resources could Marxists draw, MacIntyre asked, to engage in rational moral criticism, including criticism of allegedly Marxist states?

In his early essay “Notes from the Moral Wilderness” (1958–59), he suggested that what was needed was a teleological ethical standpoint—i.e., one according to which adherence to moral norms enables a person to achieve the human good, not by himself but in community with others. These norms are not mere means to achieving the good but are part of what the good is. From this standpoint, MacIntyre writes, “There are things that you can do which deny your common humanity with others”; he mentions the targeting of civilians in war, the denial of racial equality, and the use of show trials (see also purge trials). The basis for the refusal ever to engage in such actions is that to perform them is undercutting of the human good, including the good of community with fellow human beings.

He did worry, however, that in making these claims he was “in some danger of replacing precision by rhetoric.” The remainder of his scholarly career was in large measure dedicated to determining precisely what ethical and political views would sustain this basic moral idea, as well as precisely how one could claim to be rationally justified in asserting it.