Alasdair MacIntyre's legacy: why did virtue ethics come back?

The Glasgow-born Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre died on 21 May 2025 in a care home in South Bend, Indiana, at the age of 96. Professor emeritus of philosophy at Notre Dame and at Duke, MacIntyre was one of the few figures who changed the direction of moral philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century.

"Our moral language is a wreck"#

After Virtue, published in 1981, opens with a striking image. MacIntyre imagines a world after a catastrophe: science has been destroyed, and all that remains are disconnected terms, half-formulae and theories known only by name. People go on using the fragments but no longer know what whole they belonged to.

The modern moral vocabulary, on MacIntyre's account, is exactly like that. We go on using words like "right", "duty" and "good"; but the Aristotelian framework that made them intelligible — the idea that human life has an end, a telos — has long been abandoned.

The critique of emotivism#

The result is what MacIntyre calls emotivism: moral arguments become interminable, because the parties are in fact only expressing preferences. Debates about abortion, war or justice never end, because no shared criterion remains.

His proposed remedy is a return to Aristotle and to the Thomist tradition that grew from him. His decision to become a Catholic in 1983, at the age of fifty-five, was bound up with that intellectual journey.

Three key concepts#

MacIntyre's account of virtue has three layers:

1. Practice: rule-governed cooperative activities with goods internal to them — chess, medicine, architecture, farming. Virtues are the qualities that allow one to achieve the goods internal to a practice.
2. The narrative unity of a life: a human life is not a sum of disconnected roles but a whole that can be told from beginning to end. The question of the good life can only be asked within that unity.
3. Tradition: narratives do not stand alone; they rest on historically continuous traditions that argue with themselves.

Why it is still argued about#

When After Virtue appeared, the agenda of moral philosophy consisted largely of the opposition between utilitarianism and Kantianism. MacIntyre put a third option back on the table — an approach centred on character and virtue. Virtue ethics is now used across a wide field, from professional ethics to the design of artificial intelligence.

His critics say MacIntyre paints modernity too darkly, and that the call to "return to tradition" leaves unanswered the question of which tradition. That objection is one he addressed directly in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988).