MacIntyre on Practices, Narrative, and the Virtues

Alasdair MacIntyre (born 1929) published After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory in 1981 (revised second edition, 1984, University of Notre Dame Press), arguing that the Enlightenment project of justifying morality on a purely rational basis, independent of any Aristotelian teleology of human flourishing, was bound to fail and did in fact fail, in the hands of thinkers from Kant through Kierkegaard to the utilitarians. The result, MacIntyre contends, is that contemporary moral discourse consists of disconnected fragments of older, once-coherent traditions, used as if they still formed a working conceptual scheme, when in fact rival moral premises — for example, of rights-based liberalism against utility-based consequentialism — can no longer be rationally adjudicated between, producing the interminable, seemingly irresolvable moral disagreements MacIntyre calls emblematic of the modern condition, and pushing moral discourse in practice toward "emotivism," the reduction of moral judgments to mere expressions of preference or attempts at persuasion.