What Comes After Virtue?
In the still watches of the pre-dawn the other night, I found myself reading an obituary for one of the great philosophers of the last century. Alasdair MacIntyre passed on last week, 96 odd years young. (Hat tip Scarra Blog).
Remembering Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-2025) - Word on Fire
The obituary was penned by one of MacIntyre’s grateful former students, Christopher Kaczor. Unsurprisingly, many of the great anecdotes therein referred to his mentor’s superb teaching. These days, the best academics are steered away from the classroom and towards grant hunting. The teaching is now mainly done by juniors and sessionals. Alas. One of the almost endless failings of the modern university. MacIntyre wrote around twenty books and hundreds of scholarly articles.
Famously, he never sought or obtained a PhD:
MacIntyre was proud never to have earned a PhD: “I won’t go so far as to say that you have a deformed mind if you have a PhD, but you will have to work extra hard to remain educated.”
Ouch. He wouldn’t get a job in the academy these days!
(As one who lusted after the magic letters once, and spent seven years learning and ultimately knowing just about everything one could learn about one single subject, I can attest to the truth of his claim).
Alasdair MacIntyre, the former Marxist, atheist and latterly Catholic Thomist philosopher finally goes to his eternal reward, after a consequential life of teaching and seminal scholarship. And deserved accolades from people who matter. Expect a mini-literature on his passing. You won’t find his work in the airport bookshops. They are more up for AC Grayling.
According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
He believes that modern philosophy and modern life are characterized by the absence of any coherent moral code, and that the vast majority of individuals living in this world lack a meaningful sense of purpose in their lives and also lack any genuine community.
As a thinker MacIntyre never stopped questioning his own presuppositions. He obviously believed in the famous dictum of JM Keynes:
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?
And the “facts” and the world sure changed over the life of Alasdair MacIntyre. The title of his most famous book, After Virtue (1981), is especially apposite these days.
Here is Wikipedia:
After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory is a book on moral philosophy by the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre. MacIntyre provides a bleak view of the state of modern moral discourse, regarding it as failing to be rational, and failing to admit to being irrational.
A pretty good summary of much that passes for political discourse, too. There is so much irrationality and precious little virtue. Of course, the ruling idea of our age, moral relativism, has absolute disdain for any notion of objective virtue. Everything is subject to our own take on things. So, critics of MacIntyre’s world vie won’t be especially perturbed at his claims about moral discourse. But they would certainly push back against his claim the modern age is “irrational”. Are we not sons of the Enlightenment?
Everywhere you look, you find irrationality parading as its opposite.
MacIntyre appears as one of the great modern communitarians. He was no defender of liberal capitalism, which sees virtue and its seeking as an optional extra and fails to understand that every system, especially its own, requires good actors to ensure its success and longevity in something approaching its pure form. And MacIntyre probably see liberal capitalism as a great teacher of virtue. His preference for small communities as learning institutions resonates with the southern agrarians of North America. As he saw it:
He believes that modern philosophy and modern life are characterized by the absence of any coherent moral code, and that the vast majority of individuals living in this world lack a meaningful sense of purpose in their lives and also lack any genuine community. He draws on the ideal of the Greek polis and Aristotle’s philosophy to propose a different way of life in which people work together in genuinely political communities to acquire the virtues and fulfill their innately human purpose. This way of life is to be sustained in small communities which are to resist as best they can the destructive forces of liberal capitalism.
The modern corporate version of capitalism is especially antithetical to growing public virtue. When capitalists rediscovered what Adam Smith understood in the late 1700s to be their major flaw – the tendency to screw their customers and to seek material gains from sucking up to governments – and especially when they merged their radical individualism with the post-modernist relativist morals of former leftists to form an ugly hybrid we now recognise as the globalist corporatism of our time, they delivered a world that the early MacIntyre would not have recognised. Now we face a new dark age, as MacIntyre warned back in the early nineteen eighties. Or perhaps a blended, new imperialism.
There is a bit of twentieth century Catholic social teaching in here, too. From Pope Leo XIII. The previous Leo.
As Kaczor says:
MacIntyre’s multiple conversions were also religious. In the 1940s, he considered becoming a Presbyterian minister. In the 1950s, he became an Anglican. In the 1960s, he became an atheist. But he was “a Roman Catholic atheist. Only the Catholics worshiped a God worth denying.”
Old school. Deep thinker. Never fully formed. Always doubling back to question earlier assumptions. Alife of conversions. Not wedded to the philosophical “soup du jour”. As all philosophers should be. He belonged to a world now gone.
Oh, and did MacIntyre break up the Beatles?
Alasdair often joked that his most significant achievement was breaking up the Beatles. Conventional wisdom holds that Yoko Ono played a key role in the end of the band. In 1966, MacIntyre lived in the same apartment complex as Yoko. One day, she came to MacIntyre’s apartment and asked to borrow a ladder that she needed for her upcoming art show. It was at this art exhibit that John Lennon met Yoko. Lennon recounts, “There was another piece that really decided me for-or-against the artist: a ladder which led to a painting which was hung on the ceiling. It looked like a black canvas with a chain with a spyglass hanging on the end of it. This was near the door when you went in. I climbed the ladder, you look through the spyglass and in tiny little letters it says ‘yes.’ So it was positive. I felt relieved. It’s a great relief when you get up the ladder and you look through the spyglass and . . . it said ‘yes.’ . . . I was very impressed and John Dunbar introduced us.” Lennon mentions the ladder MacIntyre gave to Yoko three times. Without the ladder, would Lennon have been so impressed with the art exhibit? Without being so impressed, would he have asked to meet Yoko? If Lennon had not met Yoko, would the Beatles have broken up? I don’t know.
The impact of breaking up the Beatles might well become a question to be asked in philosophy courses of the future.
When MacIntyre’s ilk all die out, what will be left, I wonder? What comes after virtue?
Paul Collits
25 May 2025
What a fascinating tidbit about the ladder.