I Learned Virtue From Alasdair Macintyre (1929–2025)

Alasdair MacIntyre (1929–2025) was one of the 20th century’s most significant moral philosophers. He was a highly sought-after professor, with stops at prestigious institutions like Oxford, Brandeis, Duke, and Notre Dame.

Though I never met MacIntyre, his work exposed the ways my assumptions about the world were often formed more by modernistic, liberal values and Kantian ethics than by God’s truth. “We are all of us,” explains MacIntyre, “inhabitants of advanced modernity, bearing its social and cultural marks.”

MacIntyre’s most famous work, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, was published in 1981. It has remained in print ever since. This carefully argued book has gone through three editions and been translated into numerous languages. His thesis is that the lack of a coherent philosophy within culture meant that “we have—very largely, if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, [of] morality.” For this reason, we have no standard against which to compare our moral arguments.

The solution to this problem, he proposes, is an Aristotelian virtue ethic (which he later modified to a Thomistic version) that can fill in the void. After Virtue is a seminal book that shaped public ethical debates, and it became the first of a trilogy of books that also includes Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (1990). Throughout his works, MacIntyre consistently points out our culture’s collective amnesia about the past and the always true goodness of, well, goodness.

As MacIntyre, a Roman Catholic, notes in After Virtue, “What liberalism promotes is a kind of institutional order that is inimical to the construction and sustaining of the types of communal relationship required for the best kind of human life.” By pointing to something other than liberalism as a means by which we can live the good life—namely, virtue—MacIntyre put into words an idea that changed the way I understood Scripture. I came to see how the Bible pointed me toward purpose and virtue, which are experienced in Christian community and grounded in the Christian tradition.

Morality Beyond Duty

In my late teens and early 20s, I read the Bible as a Kantian liberal. I obeyed God’s will because it was simply there in the text. No need to think about telos, meaning, or metaphysics. I believed we simply needed to obey, and I was skeptical of those who’d reflected deeply on God’s creation. The Bible was a book filled with rules for living.

The Bible gave me oughts. But I had no sense of the universe’s grand meaning or of the “theater of God’s glory,” to use Calvin’s phrase. I was a modernist, but I didn’t know it. I thought I could follow God by paying attention to his Word without loving his world. I didn’t see the beautiful meaning and purpose in God’s creation.

My perspective changed gradually as I read the apostolic fathers and theologians like John Calvin. They introduced me to a way of seeing the world as God’s good creation corrupted by sin and in desperate need of a Redeemer, but full of grace and goodness from God. Because of common grace, that world is filled with wonder and beauty; God made it that way. There’s purpose and meaning in this world that should inform our moral reasoning.

Though I arrived at this countercultural understanding of the world through premodern sources, I couldn’t articulate my shift until I discovered MacIntyre. After Virtue gave me a vocabulary to describe my experience. More broadly, his book explains why talking about ethics in public produces more heat than light: We lack shared definitions of what is good. “There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture,” writes MacIntyre. Believing in a purposeful world created by God means we’re often intractably at odds with thinkers who deny God as the Creator of heaven and earth who gives all his creatures purpose. To use MacIntyre’s term, there’s an incommensurability to these ways of moral reasoning.

Seeking Creation’s Purpose

As someone born and raised in a thoroughly modern (or postmodern) culture, I considered a fractured understanding of morality the only possibility. Yet MacIntyre reveals this is a new way of living, since there’s a tradition of morality that our culture has, in cosmic terms, only recently abandoned. That earlier moral tradition relies not on utilitarian calculus—a relatively recent cultural adoption—but on an understanding of purpose, or telos. We know a watch that tells time is good. Why? Because that’s its purpose.

Prior to the Enlightenment, people largely assumed that every created thing has a real and inherent purpose. A good seed grows into a tree. A good carpenter builds sturdy furniture. A boy becomes a man. As Proverbs 16:4 says, “The LORD has made everything for its purpose, even the wicked for the day of trouble.” By achieving the purpose for which God created us, we embody truth, beauty, and goodness. We gain happiness, the status of a life well lived.

By achieving the purpose for which God created us, we embody truth, beauty, and goodness.

After Virtue spotlighted the modernistic assumptions of my youth, revealing their deficiencies. Despite my efforts to be thoroughly biblical, I was Kantian. I believed I could be sufficiently guided in life by obedience to God’s ought without reference to creation’s nature and purpose. MacIntyre, through his advocacy for virtue ethics, helped me appreciate God’s world more and gave me a better vocabulary to discuss morality in public.

Beyond Virtue

There’s much more to MacIntyre’s legacy beyond recovering an ancient ethical tradition. He also reveals the ways our Enlightenment assumptions continue to fail us. For example, he states in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, “The legacy of the Enlightenment has been the provision of an ideal of rational justification which it has proved impossible to attain.” The result is that, though we live in an age that claims to be rational, much of our moral reasoning is reduced to emotivism.

According to MacIntyre, in After Virtue, “Emotivism is the doctrine that . . . all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference.” It’s the ethical outworking of what we often call expressive individualism. Many of us take MacIntyre’s critiques for granted four decades later. But they were provocative when first published.

Many of us take MacIntyre’s critiques for granted four decades later. But they were provocative when first published.

MacIntyre reveals that we all used the language of ethics without remembering why. He opened up the past to us who’d forgotten that everything has a purpose—the created order has telos. We were created for a purpose. When we don’t live according to that purpose, we’re unhappy and frustrated. Thus, he helps readers understand the malaise of modernity, which has largely emptied human existence of meaning. It’s no surprise, therefore, that MacIntyre is a key thinker for postliberal and integralist thought. Yet his influence extends beyond those political spheres.

There’s been something of a resurgence among evangelicals of virtue thinking, which is embedded deeply in the Christian tradition and found in the moral order of creation. For example, Karen Swallow Prior, in On Reading Well, shows how literature forms virtue within us. She joins a cohort of writers that, knowingly or not, owe a debt to MacIntyre’s work. Furthermore, when Tim Keller argues that secular concepts of justice are insufficient, he’s building on MacIntyre’s critique of the Enlightenment. Evangelicals have much to glean from MacIntyre’s philosophy.

I find reason for hope in MacIntyre’s continued influence, especially in the recovery of the cardinal and theological virtues in ethical discourse. MacIntyre revealed my Enlightenment assumptions. He helped me read Scripture better and see the world as Christians for millennia had—full of beauty, truth, and goodness. For that, I’m thankful. I’m hopeful he’ll do the same for others.