After Virtue at forty-five: MacIntyre's diagnosis read against 2026
Alasdair MacIntyre died in May 2025 insisting that modern moral argument is interminable because the words outlived the world that made sense of them. His diagnosis in After Virtue, the disquieting suggestion, emotivism, Nietzsche or Aristotle, the wait for another Benedict, reads differently in a year of shouting. Here is what holds and what does not.
Alasdair MacIntyre died on 21 May 2025 in South Bend, Indiana, at 96, and the obituaries agreed on the shape of the career even where they disagreed about its value: the Glasgow boy who was a Marxist at twenty, an Aristotelian at fifty and a Thomist at sixty, and who spent the last four decades telling liberal modernity that it had no idea what it was talking about. We set out the thesis and the life when he died. This piece does something narrower. It takes the diagnostic argument of After Virtue (1981), the book he was still calling "a work in progress" when he revised it in 1984, and asks whether it describes the year we are living in.
The question is fair because MacIntyre invited it. After Virtue is not a treatise on the virtues; the constructive account of practices, narrative and tradition occupies its last third. The first two thirds are a diagnosis, and the diagnosis is empirical in form. It says that modern moral argument has a characteristic shape, that the shape can be explained by a historical catastrophe, and that the explanation makes a prediction: things will get worse until the catastrophe is recognised. A diagnosis of that kind can be checked. Forty-five years on, the public argument about abortion, war, migration, gender and the limits of speech has not got shorter or more tractable. Either MacIntyre was right about why, or there is a better explanation.
The book opens with a thought experiment MacIntyre labels "a disquieting suggestion". Imagine the natural sciences destroyed by a popular revolt, laboratories burned, scientists lynched, textbooks pulped. Generations later, people try to revive what was lost from fragments: half a chapter of physics, a few instruments nobody knows how to use, the names of theories without their contents. They go on using "mass" and "neutrino" and argue about them with great seriousness, but the arguments cannot be resolved, because the context that gave the terms their meaning is gone, and nobody knows it is gone. That, MacIntyre says, is the condition of moral language now. We possess the vocabulary of a lost order and mistake the fragments for the thing.
Read as a claim about 2026, the suggestion is both stronger and weaker than it looks. It is stronger because the phenomenon it predicts, argument that has the form of reasoning and the outcome of a shouting match, is now the ordinary texture of public life. MacIntyre's three examples, war, abortion and the justice of economic arrangements, are still the examples. Each side argues validly from premises the other side does not share, the premises come from incompatible traditions (Lockean rights against Aristotelian common goods, utilitarian welfare against Kantian dignity), and nothing in the shared culture adjudicates between the premises. He called the result , and it is hard to dispute that the arguments have not terminated.
Yanis Varoufakis says capitalism is dead and that 'cloud capital' now extracts rent from digital fiefs rather than profit from markets. We set out the technofeudalism thesis as an argument to be tested, then weigh the strongest objections from Morozov, Snow and Gane, and Varoufakis's 2026 reply to his Marxist critics.
It is weaker because the thought experiment assumes a unity that never existed. Historians of ethics objected at once that the pre-modern moral world was not one Aristotelian whole from which modernity fell; it was already plural, Christian and pagan, Stoic and Thomist, and the disagreements of the thirteenth century were as sharp as ours. MacIntyre conceded part of this in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), where the single lost tradition became several rival ones. But a concession of that size changes the diagnosis. If there was always more than one vocabulary, then the interminability of moral argument is not a symptom of catastrophe but the normal condition of a complex society, and what needs explaining is why we ever expected otherwise.
MacIntyre's second move was to name the theory that modern culture lives by, whether or not anyone holds it. Emotivism, as a philosophical doctrine, is the claim that moral judgements are expressions of attitude, that "this is wrong" says no more than "I disapprove of this; do so as well". As a doctrine it was refuted by the 1950s, and MacIntyre has no interest in reviving it. His claim is that it is true sociologically. A culture in which argument cannot terminate behaves as though evaluative utterance were only the expression of preference, because that is what the utterances come to in practice. The decisive sign is the disappearance of the distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations: if your reasons cannot move me, you will try other means.
This is the part of After Virtue that has worn best, and the reason is that MacIntyre gave it faces. The emotivist culture, he argued, has three "characters", social roles that fuse a personality with a function and that everybody recognises: the Rich Aesthete, who consumes experiences; the Manager, who treats ends as given and expertise as the manipulation of means; and the Therapist, who does the same for the inner life. The Manager's authority rests on a claim to a value-neutral science of effectiveness, a claim MacIntyre thought fraudulent, since no such science exists. One can test the thesis against any annual report, any platform's content policy, any statement that an algorithm has been "aligned": the vocabulary of ends is used, the ends are never argued, and the argument moves immediately to techniques. The 2026 debate about what large language models should be allowed to say has been conducted almost entirely in the Manager's register, and anyone who has sat through it will recognise MacIntyre's point without needing the book.
The weakness is symmetrical. If emotivism is a social fact rather than a theory, there is no argument against it, only a description of its costs; and MacIntyre's description is of costs to a kind of life that most people in a modern society have never led and may not want. The Manager is a caricature of bureaucratic reason, and a reader who finds the caricature apt should notice that the alternative on offer is a return to a form of community in which roles were assigned and ends were not up for discussion.
The historical heart of the book is a claim about the eighteenth century. Pre-modern ethics, on MacIntyre's reconstruction, had a three-part structure: human nature as it happens to be, human nature as it would be if it realised its telos, and the precepts that get one from the first to the second. The Enlightenment, by rejecting teleology in biology and theology alike, kept the first and third parts and threw out the second. It then set itself the task of deriving the precepts from untutored human nature alone. Hume tried the passions, Kant tried pure practical reason, Kierkegaard tried criterionless choice, Diderot tried desire. Each attempt refuted its predecessor; none succeeded; and the structure of the failure was the same in every case, since the precepts had been formulated to correct a nature that was now expected to ground them. The project, MacIntyre argued, "had to fail".
Whether it did fail is the point at which professional philosophers part company with him. Rawls was publishing throughout MacIntyre's career, Habermas's discourse ethics appeared in 1983, Korsgaard's reconstruction of Kant in 1996, and none of them accepted the premise that a non-teleological ethics must be groundless. Their reply was that MacIntyre had chosen his examples. Kant's categorical imperative was never meant as a derivation from human nature; its whole point was to be independent of it. MacIntyre's counter, that the test of universalisability lets through any maxim a sufficiently ingenious agent can universalise, is a standard objection with standard answers. The verdict here is unresolved, and a reader can hold that MacIntyre was right about the culture and wrong about the philosophers.
What makes After Virtue a book rather than a survey is the chapter that turns the diagnosis into a fork. If the Enlightenment project failed, MacIntyre argues, then Nietzsche was the one philosopher honest enough to say what follows: that moral vocabulary is a mask for will, that the "free spirit" must make his own values, and that talk of rights and utility is, in Nietzsche's word, a fiction. Nietzsche is the emotivist culture's prophet, and his critique of modern morality cannot be answered from inside modern morality. It can be answered only if the Enlightenment's original rejection of Aristotle was a mistake. Hence the title of chapter nine, "Nietzsche or Aristotle?", and the structure of everything that follows: a wager that the Aristotelian tradition, suitably revised, survives the genealogical critique better than its liberal successors do.
Here 2026 supplies an irony MacIntyre would not have enjoyed. The fork assumed that Nietzsche's heirs would be solitary aesthetes and that Aristotle's would be communities of practice. The political movements of the past decade have reversed the casting. The vocabulary of will, strength, contempt for "slave morality" and the free creation of values is now the property of mass movements and online subcultures, while the vocabulary of practices, internal goods and local community is defended, often, by the liberals MacIntyre despised. Our recent piece on the Genealogy and the value of values made a related observation from the other side. The fork still stands. The traffic on its two branches is not what the book predicted.
The final page of After Virtue is its most quoted and least understood. Having compared our situation to the last years of the Roman Empire, MacIntyre adds that the parallel is imperfect in one way: "This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time." And then: "We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict."
Two readings have competed for forty-five years. The first, which came to dominate American conservatism after Rod Dreher borrowed the phrase for The Benedict Option (2017), takes it as a call to retreat: build local communities of virtue and let the empire fall. MacIntyre kept his distance from the appropriation, and the text supports him. His Benedict is an inventor of forms of community "within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages", not a founder of enclaves; the original Benedict's monasteries were, among other things, the agricultural and scholarly infrastructure of a continent. The second reading, which is closer to MacIntyre's own politics, takes the sentence as an admission of failure. A philosopher who believed that rational argument within a tradition could settle moral questions ends his most argumentative book by saying that argument will not be enough and that someone, as yet unknown, will have to build something.
That admission is the right place to test the diagnosis against the present. MacIntyre never romanticised the local; he was clear that traditions can carry injustice, and he was no friend of the nation-state as a community of any kind, which is why he refused the label "communitarian" that press and colleagues pinned on him alongside Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel. In 2004 he argued that a vote for either American presidential candidate was a vote for a system that offered only unacceptable options, and he never retracted the view. The difficulty is that the "new dark ages" he described in 1981 have, on his own account, kept coming, and the new Benedict has not. Movements that call themselves communities of virtue have arrived, and most of them look more like the barbarians than the monastery.
Strip the prophecy away and three things in the diagnosis hold up. The first is the observation that modern moral argument is conducted between incommensurable premises and that the shared culture has no procedure for ranking them; the forty-five years since the book have supplied nothing but confirmation. The second is the account of the Manager, which is the most accurate description in post-war philosophy of what it feels like to be governed by people who have stopped arguing about ends. The third is the insistence that an ethics has to say what a human life is for before it can say what to do, which is why the book made virtue ethics a live option again, and why Nussbaum, Foot, Hursthouse and Annas, none of whom accepted MacIntyre's history, all worked in its wake.
What does not hold is the catastrophe. There was no single fall, there is no single tradition to recover, and the choice between Nietzsche and Aristotle is a choice between two reconstructions, each as contested as the modern theories they were supposed to replace. MacIntyre knew the first point by 1988 and never quite adjusted the rhetoric to match. The honest summary is that he was a better diagnostician than historian and a better historian than prophet, and that the diagnosis, the part that can be checked, is the part that has survived. In a year when public argument has the form he described and the outcome he feared, that is more than most philosophers of his generation can claim.
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