Alasdair MacIntyre retains his power to shock

I still remember the first time I read Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. I was a graduate student in religious ethics at Yale, and someone, perhaps my advisor, suggested that I take a look at it. As I recall, it was recommended to me as a novelty, an interesting alternative to the analytic approach that dominated moral philosophy and, to a considerable extent, religious ethics as well. I certainly found that reading MacIntyre, who died last week, but I also found much more. To me, After Virtue had the force of a revelation. It opened up the possibility of a different way of studying and thinking about ethics, whether secular or religious: a discourse dominated by historically embedded conceptions of the good, grounded in ideals of honor, integrity, and, of course, virtue.

To a young aspiring scholar formed in the dry ascetical discourse of 20th-century moral philosophy, this made for exhilarating reading. I remember going to my professors, brimming over with new possibilities, ready to direct my whole doctoral program towards a study of moral traditions. They calmed me down and cautioned me against moving too quickly into this new approach. And I took their advice, but only up to a point. By the end of my graduate program I had begun to distance myself from some elements of MacIntyre’s program. I found that I was not entirely persuaded by his critique of the Enlightenment understanding of rationality, or perhaps I should say that I began to give more weight to the continuities between pre-modern and Enlightenment conceptions of rationality than MacIntyre did. Nonetheless, by that point he had already shaped my approach to the discipline of theological ethics—and to moral reflection more generally—in profound ways. He showed me the value of looking at a moral concept or debate in light of its historical and social context, and from that point it was impossible for me to see these things any other way.

I have spent some time describing my first reactions to After Virtue, because, as I soon learned, these were not just my reactions. It was one of those books that became a touchstone for a whole generation of young scholars, because it opened up a new, promising way of approaching a familiar subject. We had been trained to think in terms of abstractions, principles, and logical arguments. Religious ethics, too, generally emphasized abstraction over the concrete particularities of experience and belief. MacIntyre challenged this whole way of viewing the field, in the most uncompromising terms.