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- Alasdair MacIntyre was born January 12, 1929 in Glasgow, Scotland. His parents, both of which were physicians, were born and raised in the West of Scotland. Though Educated in England, he learned Scots Gaelic from one of his aunts. MacIntyre grew up in and around the city of London.
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MacIntyre was born on 12 January 1929 in Glasgow, to Eneas and Greta (Chalmers) MacIntyre. He was educated at Queen Mary College, London, and has a Master of Arts degree from the University of Manchester and from the University of Oxford. He began his teaching career in 1951 at Manchester.
- Overview
- Encounter with Marxism
- After Virtue and later works
Alasdair MacIntyre (born Jan. 12, 1929, Glasgow, Scot.) Scottish-born philosopher, one of the great moral thinkers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, well known for reintroducing Aristotelian ethics and politics into mainstream philosophy and for emphasizing the role of history in philosophical theorizing.
(Read Peter Singer’s Britannica entry on ethics.)
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MacIntyre’s early political allegiances and early scholarly work were oriented toward Marxism. (He published Marxism: An Interpretation [1953] when he was 24 years old.) But he became unsettled by what he took to be the inability of Marxists to respond cogently in moral terms to outrages perpetrated in nominally Marxist regimes. Given the Marxist critique of morality as ideological, upon what resources could Marxists draw, MacIntyre asked, to engage in rational moral criticism, including criticism of allegedly Marxist states?
In his early essay “Notes from the Moral Wilderness” (1958–59), he suggested that what was needed was a teleological ethical standpoint—i.e., one according to which adherence to moral norms enables a person to achieve the human good, not by himself but in community with others. These norms are not mere means to achieving the good but are part of what the good is. From this standpoint, MacIntyre writes, “There are things that you can do which deny your common humanity with others”; he mentions the targeting of civilians in war, the denial of racial equality, and the use of show trials (see also purge trials). The basis for the refusal ever to engage in such actions is that to perform them is undercutting of the human good, including the good of community with fellow human beings.
He did worry, however, that in making these claims he was “in some danger of replacing precision by rhetoric.” The remainder of his scholarly career was in large measure dedicated to determining precisely what ethical and political views would sustain this basic moral idea, as well as precisely how one could claim to be rationally justified in asserting it.
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In the two decades following “Notes from the Moral Wilderness,” MacIntyre’s work consisted, in his words, in “heterogeneous, badly organized, sometimes fragmented and often frustrating and messy inquiries” in ethics, political philosophy, and social theory. But from this work emerged After Virtue (1981), which set out the basic ideas that MacIntyre developed for the remainder of his career. In After Virtue, MacIntyre argued that modern moral theories are incapable of explaining the rational authority of moral norms—what makes moral norms rationally compelling—and suggested that, if such theories are the only option, morality should have as little authority over one’s conduct as the 18th-century Polynesian norms of taboo have over the conduct of contemporary Westerners. Indefensible as either an inevitable product of human attitudes or as a construction of pure reason, moral norms can best be understood as a vestige of an earlier ethical scheme—Aristotelianism—and can regain their intelligibility only if such a scheme is restored.
In particular, MacIntyre claimed that the elements of a rationally defensible morality could be found in Aristotle’s theory of virtue. According to this theory, the authority of moral virtues and moral rules lies in the fact that habituation to such virtues and adherence to such rules enable humans to pass from a state of imperfection to perfection—from (as MacIntyre put it) “untutored human nature” to “man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-telos [end].”
MacIntyre argued, however, that Aristotle’s theory is not acceptable as it stands; in After Virtue he claimed that it must be restated in a way that does not depend on Aristotle’s outdated “metaphysical biology.” According to Aristotle, each species, including the human species, has natural ends that set the good for beings of that species; such a view MacIntyre took to be incompatible with modern science. (MacIntyre later became more sympathetic to the dependence of ethics on biology; see biology, philosophy of: evolutionary ethics.) In its place he offered a theory in which a human quality counts as a virtue if it is indispensable for achieving goods internal to certain “practices” (e.g., chess, baseball, philosophy, and politics), for sustaining a person in a quest for the good life, or for sustaining communities in their common pursuit of the good.
That the good for humans involves inquiry and deliberation implies, in MacIntyre’s view, that the human good can be realized only within a certain sort of political community, one in which citizens have an ongoing role in setting its law and policy in communal deliberation. In After Virtue he criticized the politics of the modern nation-state as “civil war carried on by other means” and argued that contemporary disputes about justice cannot be brought to a rational conclusion if the nation-state is assumed to be a privileged political framework. In Dependent Rational Animals (1999) he elaborated upon these arguments, holding that the nation-state is, from the ethical perspective that he articulated, inadequate, because it sustains only a politics of bargaining in which control is wielded by elites of wealth and power. Indeed, its very size prevents it from sustaining a politics of rational deliberation. On MacIntyre’s politics, the hegemony of the nation-state is undermining of the good of human beings; what is needed is an intensely deliberative politics of local community, one epitomized by the Greek polis (city-state) of Aristotle’s day.
- Mark C. Murphy
Alasdair MacIntyre was born January 12, 1929 in Glasgow, Scotland. His parents, both of which were physicians, were born and raised in the West of Scotland. Though Educated in England, he learned Scots Gaelic from one of his aunts. MacIntyre grew up in and around the city of London.
MacIntyre was born on 12 January 1929 in Glasgow, to Eneas and Greta (Chalmers) MacIntyre. He was educated at Queen Mary College, London, and has a Master of Arts degree from the University of Manchester and from the University of Oxford. He began his teaching career in 1951 at Manchester.
Alasdair MacIntyre was born in 1929, in Glasgow, Scotland. He holds MA degrees from the University of Manchester and University College at Oxford, and taught at several institutions in the United Kingdom before moving to the United States in 1970.
Alasdair MacIntyre has contributed to the diverse fields of social, moral and political philosophy. He is one of the leading proponents of a virtue ethical approach in moral philosophy, part of a wider attempt to recover an Aristotelian conception of both morality and politics.
Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre was born in Glasgow, Scotland. He was philosophically trained at Manchester University and subsequently taught at Manchester, Leeds University, Oxford University, and the University of Essex before emigrating to the United States in 1970.
