Humanity According to Alasdair MacIntyre

One of the world’s greatest Catholic philosophers died May 21. Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre was 96.

Normally classified as a philosopher of ethics, MacIntyre was a fierce critic of modern ethical theory. His writings drew deeply from a wide array of fields, including theology, social science, psychology, history and literature, but he never pursued a doctorate. Born in Glasgow, he received master’s degrees from Manchester and Oxford, later telling a student: “I won’t go so far as to say that you have a deformed mind if you have a Ph.D., but you will have to work extra hard to remain educated.”

In his most famous work, “After Virtue” (1981), MacIntyre contended that moral discourse in the 20th century had become fragmented and largely meaningless, an outcome he believed inevitable given modernity’s rejection of “any view of man as having an essence which defines his true end.” The dominant forms of moral theory, such as Immanuel Kant’s deontology and John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism, fail, MacIntyre believed, because they treat mankind only as it happens to be, rather than as it ought to be, in light of our human ends. “After Virtue” confronts its reader with the choice of Nietzsche or Aristotle—an embrace of postmodern amoralism or a return to a tradition of the virtues.

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