In a 1981 book with an austere title, After Virtue, the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre made a quiet but searing observation: we no longer agree on what it means to be good, but we continue to argue as though we do. This, he claimed, is the central moral confusion of the modern world. What makes After Virtue extraordinary is that it doesn’t simply lament this confusion – it proposes a way through it, by reviving a very old idea: the life of virtue.
MacIntyre’s work is sometimes associated with a return to Aristotelian ethics, but that doesn’t quite capture the scope of his ambition. He isn’t just another voice calling us back to classical virtues like courage or temperance. He is, more radically, diagnosing a kind of cultural amnesia. In place of coherent moral frameworks, he argues, we have inherited fragments – moral concepts that have been severed from their original contexts and thus rendered hollow. Words like “justice”, “rights”, or “duty” are thrown about in political and ethical debates, but there is little consensus about what they mean or why they matter. They function like ancient ruins: still visible, but disconnected from their foundations.
The Problem with Modern Morality
MacIntyre’s critique of modern moral discourse is not that it’s wrong, but that it’s unintelligible. In a famous passage early in After Virtue, he asks us to imagine a world in which science had been devastated – laboratories destroyed, textbooks burned – and later reconstructed from scraps. The new science that emerged might preserve certain vocabulary and rituals but would be fundamentally incoherent. This, he suggests, is our situation with morality: we still use the language of virtue and obligation, but the moral structure has collapsed.
The root cause of this collapse, MacIntyre believes, is the Enlightenment. That may sound grandiose, or even reactionary. But his point is subtle: Enlightenment thinkers sought to ground morality in reason alone, independent of religion or tradition. The result, however, was a parade of competing and incompatible moral theories – Kantian duty, utilitarian calculation, contractarian rights – none of which could establish a shared foundation. Without a common telos, or goal of life, these theories ultimately dissolved into the kind of sterile moralism we now associate with online outrage and parliamentary debates. “My rights!” “Your obligations!” “The greatest good!” And so on, in endless dispute.
A Return to Virtue
So what’s the alternative? For MacIntyre, it begins with Aristotle. Not because Aristotle had the right answers to our contemporary dilemmas, but because he had the right questions. Chief among them: What is the good life for a human being? Ethics, for Aristotle, was not about rule-following or abstract duties, but about the cultivation of character. A good person is someone who possesses the virtues – those excellences of character that enable us to flourish as the kind of beings we are.
MacIntyre revives this teleological view of ethics: to understand what counts as good, we must first understand what we are for. Just as the good knife is the one that cuts well, a good life is one that realises its human potential. But unlike Aristotle, MacIntyre is not writing for a unified Greek polis. He is writing for modern readers, fragmented and dislocated, unsure what it means to be at home in a tradition. His project is not just to recover virtue – but to recover the social contexts that make virtue possible.
Practices, Traditions, and Narratives
To that end, MacIntyre introduces several key concepts: practices, traditions, and narrative unity.
A practice is not just any activity, but a socially established, cooperative pursuit of internal goods. Playing the violin, for example, is a practice; so is chess, architecture, or farming. Each has standards of excellence that can only be appreciated from within. You can’t fake being a good violinist by winning, or by appearing confident. You have to actually engage with the discipline.
Virtues, in this view, are the qualities we need to sustain and deepen such practices: honesty, courage, patience, humility. And crucially, MacIntyre distinguishes between internal goods (excellence in the practice itself) and external goods (money, fame, power). Modern culture, he argues, is obsessed with the latter. But a society concerned solely with external goods will eventually destroy the integrity of its practices. The aspiring surgeon, for example, who only wants wealth, may succeed in making money but fail to become a good doctor.
Practices are not isolated. They are embedded in traditions, which MacIntyre defines as historically extended arguments about the good. Traditions are not static or nostalgic – they are dynamic conversations, shaped by reason and experience over time. Within a tradition, virtues can be understood and debated meaningfully. Outside of one, they become empty gestures.
Finally, MacIntyre argues that the self is not best understood as a sovereign chooser but as a story. To make sense of our lives morally, we must think of ourselves as characters in a narrative, striving for coherence and purpose. A life without such a narrative is like a novel with the pages out of order – full of events, but without meaning.
What Does This Mean for Us?
MacIntyre famously ends After Virtue with a provocative line: “What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.” He likens our time to the collapse of the Roman world: an era in which the moral architecture has crumbled, and we must now rebuild it from the ground up, through practices, traditions, and communities of virtue.
But MacIntyre is not simply calling us to retreat into monasteries or moral enclaves. Rather, he’s reminding us that ethics is not something we have – like a set of principles – but something we do, together, over time. We become better by engaging in practices that matter, by learning from traditions that guide us, and by telling stories about our lives that hold up to scrutiny.
In this light, virtue ethics is not a museum piece but a living alternative to moral fragmentation. It asks us to reimagine ethics not as a set of decisions, but as a form of life.
And so the question MacIntyre leaves us with is not What should I do? but rather: What kind of person should I become? And with whom?
