Scottish Catholic moral and political philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre died May 22 at the age of 96. It is no exaggeration to say that MacIntyre changed the world. His 1981 book “After Virtue” is arguably the most important book of moral and political philosophy of the 20th century.
MacIntyre more fully developed the themes of “After Virtue” in two subsequent books, “Whose Justice? Which Rationality?” (1988) and “Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition” (1990). In these three seminal works, which I’ll call the “virtue trilogy,” MacIntyre revived what he called “Aristotelian Thomism,” which can be described as a return to the centrality of virtue for moral and political life. Probably no one has had more impact on the development of Catholic philosophy and theology. Generations of students have been influenced by these and others of MacIntyre’s nearly 30 books.
I had the privilege of meeting MacIntyre only once and very briefly, when he spent an afternoon with my Ph.D. cohort at Boston College in the late 1980s. But no single person has had a greater impact on the trajectory of my development as a theologian. My introduction to his later work was somewhat indirect. I had discussed his 1968 book, “Marxism and Christianity,” in one of my master’s degree theses, but only as a foil. About the same time I was writing that thesis, MacIntyre’s former Notre Dame colleague, Methodist theologian Stanley Hauerwas, encouraged me to read “After Virtue” for a better appreciation of MacIntyre’s developing thought. I did. And it, along with the rest of the virtue trilogy, changed my life.
What I learned from MacIntyre
For the purpose of this brief appreciation, I learned two important lessons from Alasdair MacIntyre. First, the theory of individual possessive rights is a pernicious fiction, rooted in a false moral anthropology. Second, we humans are, as the title of a later book describes us, “Dependent Rational Animals.”
“There are no such [things as individual] rights,” wrote MacIntyre in “After Virtue,” “and belief in them is one with belief in witches and unicorns.” If this strikes the American reader as heretical, his statement in a following paragraph will seem beyond the pale. Natural rights are “fictions,” MacIntyre explains, “but fictions with highly specific properties.” Individual rights are inventions of the modern liberal project. And they are not compatible with Christian doctrine regarding creation and the human person. Indeed, they were invented for the purpose of rejecting the Christian notion of teleology, the theory that the human person is ordered toward some good that is embedded in the very nature of creation.
The modern theory of individual rights teaches us that we are all enemies of one another in pursuit of moral goods that satisfy our emotional desires. Rights are “rational,” but only in the sense that they serve the function of securing our unrestricted pursuit of individual goods, all in competition with everyone else. In other words, rights are the “ratio” by which we pursue whatever we determine to be moral goods. But these goods are nothing other than individual preferences.
I am painting with a broad brush, but it’s not unfair to say that, for MacIntyre, these preferences can be reduced to various themes of “emotivism.” Moral goods in this context are nothing other than those choices that satisfy our irrational desires, divorced from any good transcending or judging those desires. In this doctrine, explains MacIntyre, “all evaluative and … moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.” This is the official moral theory of the United States, expressed in, for example, the Declaration of Independence.
A philosophical defense of Christian solidarity
Closely related to the theory of possessive natural rights is the notion that the human person is naturally individual and an enemy of every other human person. In a fictional “state of nature,” human life is a war of every man against every man. This is directly contradictory to the Christian theology of the human person. We are created by God in and for community with others. And, along with others, we are ordered toward common goods that are given in the very nature of creation. In Catholic theology, we call this the doctrine of solidarity. In MacIntyre’s language, this is the theory that we are “dependent rational animals.” He did not, of course, originate the idea, but MacIntyre’s “Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry” and “Dependent Rational Animals” are probably the most powerful philosophical defenses of that doctrine.
We humans are created to be mutually dependent on one another for the procurement of the authentic goods that secure human flourishing. Humans cannot develop properly apart from the company of other humans, in a common, mutual pursuit of reciprocal needs. We are social creatures, not individualist ones. And we cannot fulfil the potential of authentic human personhood apart from one another. This is what Pope St. John Paul II called disinterested reciprocity. In contrast, individual possessive rights are corrosive of this fundamental Christian doctrine. And they are the lingua franca of American moral and political discourse. MacIntyre reminded us that this is not only false, but pernicious.
In this short space, I can only broadly introduce these themes. Alasdair MacIntyre spent the last 40 years of his life developing them in all their nuance and intricacies. And many books will be written about him in the future, to go along with those already written in the past. The best I can do is point the reader in toward his voluminous output and express my eternal gratitude for this great man.
Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre — Jan. 12, 1929, to May 22, 2025 — rest in peace.
