The MacIntyre piece I read first and got the most from is "Hegel on Faces and Skulls". It explains Hegel's critique of physiognomy and phrenology, which is about what we can and cannot learn about someone by looking at them. Said another way, the difference between expressions and physical traits. I think about it a lot whenever I see claims made about facial recognition systems, and in my day job working on motion capture.
I recommend some of his other works: Whose Justice, Whose Rationality and Dependent Rational Animals.
It’s rewarding to seem him attempt a reconciliation between some modern epistemologies and Augustinian Thomism. I’m not sure he really pulls it off but his stature as a thinker in moral philosophy is undeniable.
I am not Roman Catholic anymore, but I read After Virtue shortly after I graduated from college and it fundamentally changed my moral worldview for the better. I owe him a great debt.
I read After Virtue while in college and suffering something of an existential crisis. That book really challenged me to shift my thinking on purpose and meaning. It holds great value to me on a personal level. Thank you, Professor MacIntyre.
Eastern Orthodox Christian. After Virtue is not a specifically Roman Catholic work, even though MacIntyre started slowly agree with its Aristotelian ethical system, and I still recommend the book to anyone willing to put in the work to understand it.
After Virtue was one of my favorite books, and it helped me get started learning about the history of ideas. I knew he was getting older, but I'm saddened to see him pass. In college, I had hoped that I could meet him one day. Rest in peace.
“After Virtue” annoys me because it basically argues that morality only makes sense within cultural traditions, as if we’re all just trapped in our local narratives with no access to universal truths. MacIntyre romanticizes ancient communities and traditions, but ignores the fact that plenty of those upheld horrifying practices—like slavery, misogyny, or human sacrifice—and calling those ‘virtuous’ just because they fit a narrative feels like moral relativism in disguise.
I get that modern ethics can feel fragmented, but the answer isn’t to retreat into tribalism or pretend reason can’t give us shared values across cultures.
Just because some people are bad at finding moral clarity doesn’t mean it’s impossible or meaningless.
> Universalism: that is the intellectual realm abutting utopianism and ethnocentrism. "There are universal values, and they happen to be mine," was Stanley Hoffman’s delightful definition of the latter. Like utopianism and ethnocentrism, universalism normalizes, excludes, and shouts down. If “universal” does not mean universally accepted, then it means nothing. Those who do not accept must therefore at least be marginalized, and if possible stigmatized.
> MacIntyre romanticizes ancient communities and traditions, but ignores the fact that plenty of those upheld horrifying practices
What makes you think that? A huge part of After Virtue (basically the whole part, after the initial diagnosis of where we are now and how we got here) is about how to construct and understand communities that might provide a shared idea of human good without simply going back to an Athenian idea of what that looks like. In fact if I were to summarize the book in a nutshell I would argue its an attempt to rehabilitate Aristotelian ethics without simply accepting Aristotle's own moral percepts.
I think that's why I find his later works more compelling, particularly "Dependent Rational Animals," in which he grounds traditions in human telos. There are aims or goods which are common and transcend social constructs. After Virtue suffers from a great premise but doesn't quite stick the landing.
I think there is a difference between there being a universal moral Truth (ontological) vs. a particular individuals ability to know that universal (epistemological). The former doesn't necessarily imply the latter. Rejecting the latter (the ability to know) doesn't require rejecting the former (the universal).
If one considers that these two are decoupled, it poses a question: how could one live in alignment to a universal truth that one cannot know. It makes me wonder, can we find meaning without certainty.
Even in this age of the rejection of religious dogma, I tend to notice that people still want to cling to certainty. They are certain there is no morality (nihilism) or they are certain that morality can be found either in the study of nature (through empiricism) or reason (through rationalism).
I hardly ever see anyone suggest that they humbly do not know.
That's what the field of philosophy is about. I think, for instance, utilitarianism makes a lot more sense than "follow whatever your birth community historically does."
I dunno. Utilitarianism sounds nice on the surface—how can you be against the greatest good for the greatest number?—but it’s pretty under-specified (hedonic or preference? act or rule? do you discount future beings’ utils, and at what rate?) and if you take any particular specification seriously you get moral claims that are wildly counterintuitive, like “insect suffering is orders of magnitude more important than heart disease in humans” or “there may be quadrillions of sentient beings in the far future, and making their lives 1% better is a better use of resources than eradicating malaria now” or “it’s morally justified to steal billions of dollars of other people’s money to give to pandemic prevention and AI safety.” And maybe these are correct claims, but they definitely don’t align with many people’s moral intuitions, and it’d be a tall task to convince those people.
Often people are justifying moral systems that make sense overall but contain individual values that are grandfathered in, but maybe don’t make as much sense as the rest. There is a resistance to the kind of clarity that could force you to question some traditional values. Slavery is a good example to think about.
I am very confused by these claims, because MacIntyre was exactly opposed to relativism, and emotivism, which he saw as characteristic of the hollow shell of modern morality [0]. He acknowledges Nietzsche's criticism of the farce of Enlightenment morals. He appealed to telos as the objective basis for ethics and morality and in that book advocated for return to Aristote.
Perhaps you misunderstand what culture is. It isn't some kind of fiction we lay on top of reality that gets in the way of reality. It is a shared language of a people about reality and one that is not static, but hopefully developing, but at the very least changing. Science is itself a part of culture. You are born into a culture, which can be anything form pretty good to downright lousy, and the "dialogue" of this culture of a people with reality, and other cultures, moves the development of this culture.
Think of all the things you have learned in the scope of science. That aggregate of learning is culture. The presuppositions that science rests on is culture. This doesn't contradict the possibility of knowing the universal. Rather, it is through the cultural that you come to know the universal and through which you are better prepared to know it. We benefit from thousands of years of cultural dialogue. We cannot attain a very high understanding of reality without immersing ourselves in this dialogue of cultures spanning human history.
(Incidentally, as MacIntyre was a Catholic convert, one thing the Catholic Church makes possible is the existence of both the particularity of ethnos and the universality of the Church; "catholic" means "universal". A multiplicity of cultures sharing in the universal, avoiding both cultural parochialism and an alienated cosmopolitanism.)
Different cultures have a lot in common and so do their morals. Culture is not arbitrary; it always has a grounding in universal human needs and features as well as somewhat variable factors such as environment.
Richard Rorty, whose humanism and love of democracy MacIntyre despised.
Over the course of his career, MacIntyre went from an extreme left Marxist to an extreme right Thomist, and the only constant was his hatred of liberalism. He really couldn't stand the idea that people could believe in rationalism, feel the moral force of individual rights, or make purpose and meaning for themselves, all without appealing to an authoritarian source of control.
You're left with either Nietzsche's arbitrary will, or virtues (à la Aristotle). For the latter, MacIntyre attempted to develop a system of morality (? ethics?) based on human biology:
Once can certainly tell oneself that there is a certain purpose or meaning to one's life, but if you're a materialist, then (the argument goes (AIUI)) it's not true.
The arrangement of atoms is arbitrary and without meaning, and to call some arrangement(s) "good" or "bad" or better / worse is a value judgement that is just as arbitrary and meaningless.
He didn’t write as if he hated liberalism. Maybe he did. But in his work you get deep, principled critique from the basis of epistemology and selfhood.
Lenin wrote like someone who hates liberalism. Stephen Miller gives that vibe from the right, though I doubt he can write anything coherent at all.
> Perhaps, but 20 years after Rorty's death, he's largely forgotten.
No, he's not. Not at all. Rorty has been and always will be more important, and more famous, than MacIntyre. This is not to insult MacIntyre, who was important within philosophical circles but not so much in the general public, except perhaps within religious groups, with which I'm not well acquainted.
Rorty's breadth of influence was also greater than MacIntyre's, ranging from "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" to "Achieving Our Country", addressing vastly different subjects and audiences.
Not to mention the huge posthumous bump that Rorty got for being labeled "The Philosopher who predicted Trump." There was even a new collection of his essays out in 2022 [0].
I disagree with MacIntyre about a lot, both in theology and political philosophy, but I respect him for having tried to engage with both Nietzsche and the french philosophers heavily influenced by him as well as sticking by his egalitarian ethics even after the successful revolt of Reagan and the yuppies.
'When asked in 1996 what values he retained from his Marxist days, MacIntyre answered, “I would still like to see every rich person hanged from the nearest lamp post.”'
> every rich person hanged from the nearest lamp post
As the joke from the 00s went - in other news, Cisco has become today the first company to close its doors because all its employees cashed out their stock options and quit.
That is, hanging rich persons from the lamp posts is probably not the maxim that would resonate well on the HN :)
To be clear, i'm not religious nor do i have much in the way of faith.
I just don't think faith and philosophy are mutually exclusive.
My impression of organised religion is unfavourable so I'm almost certainly biased in my perspective of religion being the reason faith gets such a bad reputation.
I am not conflating faith with religion, but the statement clearly refers to his religion...MacIntyre appeals and arguments smuggle theology in through the back door.
Presents basic commitments as if they were simply the unavoidable presuppositions of moral reasoning, yet in practice the basic commitments he privileges are those of Roman-Catholic Thomism. By treating them as axiomatic rather than doctrinal...transforms a Catholic moral vision
into what looks like a neutral starting point.
Disguises an apologetic project as pure philosophy.
“At the foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements
the truth of which no further reason can be given.”
― Alasdair C. MacIntyre, After Virtue
This is a very common stance in the Roman Catholic Church. The concept of “faith and reason” as two sides of the same coin both leading to truth is a pretty major teaching in the church these days.
Actually, most christian denominations believe you go to heaven or hell(or purgatory for catholics) immediately after you die.
But some churches, like Jehovah's witnesses and adventists believe in the "soul sleep", so the soul sleeps until the second coming of Christ, then you are sent to either heaven or hell.
> most christian denominations believe you go to heaven or hell ... immediately
> some churches ... believe ... the soul sleeps until the second coming of Christ, then you are sent to either heaven or hell.
It's nuanced and a lot of Christians don't catch the nuance, but the Bible speaks both of an immediate transfer of the soul to one place or the other upon death and also of an eventual resurrection (of all souls into bodies) at the second coming, followed by final judgement.
The MacIntyre piece I read first and got the most from is "Hegel on Faces and Skulls". It explains Hegel's critique of physiognomy and phrenology, which is about what we can and cannot learn about someone by looking at them. Said another way, the difference between expressions and physical traits. I think about it a lot whenever I see claims made about facial recognition systems, and in my day job working on motion capture.
I recommend some of his other works: Whose Justice, Whose Rationality and Dependent Rational Animals.
It’s rewarding to seem him attempt a reconciliation between some modern epistemologies and Augustinian Thomism. I’m not sure he really pulls it off but his stature as a thinker in moral philosophy is undeniable.
I am not Roman Catholic anymore, but I read After Virtue shortly after I graduated from college and it fundamentally changed my moral worldview for the better. I owe him a great debt.
Requiescat in pace.
I read After Virtue while in college and suffering something of an existential crisis. That book really challenged me to shift my thinking on purpose and meaning. It holds great value to me on a personal level. Thank you, Professor MacIntyre.
What would you consider yourself now, spiritually, if not Catholic?
Eastern Orthodox Christian. After Virtue is not a specifically Roman Catholic work, even though MacIntyre started slowly agree with its Aristotelian ethical system, and I still recommend the book to anyone willing to put in the work to understand it.
Thank you brother
To paraphrase Ricky Jervias (and probably Richard Dawkins before him)...
He just believes in one fewer gods now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SGOGH5-SCA
I certainly see a through line between Chesterton and After Virtue. As a certified Heretics Enjoyer I'm sold.
After Virtue was one of my favorite books, and it helped me get started learning about the history of ideas. I knew he was getting older, but I'm saddened to see him pass. In college, I had hoped that I could meet him one day. Rest in peace.
“After Virtue” annoys me because it basically argues that morality only makes sense within cultural traditions, as if we’re all just trapped in our local narratives with no access to universal truths. MacIntyre romanticizes ancient communities and traditions, but ignores the fact that plenty of those upheld horrifying practices—like slavery, misogyny, or human sacrifice—and calling those ‘virtuous’ just because they fit a narrative feels like moral relativism in disguise.
I get that modern ethics can feel fragmented, but the answer isn’t to retreat into tribalism or pretend reason can’t give us shared values across cultures.
Just because some people are bad at finding moral clarity doesn’t mean it’s impossible or meaningless.
> Universalism: that is the intellectual realm abutting utopianism and ethnocentrism. "There are universal values, and they happen to be mine," was Stanley Hoffman’s delightful definition of the latter. Like utopianism and ethnocentrism, universalism normalizes, excludes, and shouts down. If “universal” does not mean universally accepted, then it means nothing. Those who do not accept must therefore at least be marginalized, and if possible stigmatized.
-- Richard Taruskin [1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/10/arts/the-new-seasonclassi...
Yes, for instance, I think its fine if people who support hurting other innocent people are marginalized.
That doesn't actually solve the problem, it simply moves the debate into what constitutes innocence and hurting.
> MacIntyre romanticizes ancient communities and traditions, but ignores the fact that plenty of those upheld horrifying practices
What makes you think that? A huge part of After Virtue (basically the whole part, after the initial diagnosis of where we are now and how we got here) is about how to construct and understand communities that might provide a shared idea of human good without simply going back to an Athenian idea of what that looks like. In fact if I were to summarize the book in a nutshell I would argue its an attempt to rehabilitate Aristotelian ethics without simply accepting Aristotle's own moral percepts.
I think that's why I find his later works more compelling, particularly "Dependent Rational Animals," in which he grounds traditions in human telos. There are aims or goods which are common and transcend social constructs. After Virtue suffers from a great premise but doesn't quite stick the landing.
I think there is a difference between there being a universal moral Truth (ontological) vs. a particular individuals ability to know that universal (epistemological). The former doesn't necessarily imply the latter. Rejecting the latter (the ability to know) doesn't require rejecting the former (the universal).
If one considers that these two are decoupled, it poses a question: how could one live in alignment to a universal truth that one cannot know. It makes me wonder, can we find meaning without certainty.
Even in this age of the rejection of religious dogma, I tend to notice that people still want to cling to certainty. They are certain there is no morality (nihilism) or they are certain that morality can be found either in the study of nature (through empiricism) or reason (through rationalism).
I hardly ever see anyone suggest that they humbly do not know.
How can reason give us shared values across cultures? Why do you suppose your moral clarity was generated from your brain and not your gut?
That's what the field of philosophy is about. I think, for instance, utilitarianism makes a lot more sense than "follow whatever your birth community historically does."
I dunno. Utilitarianism sounds nice on the surface—how can you be against the greatest good for the greatest number?—but it’s pretty under-specified (hedonic or preference? act or rule? do you discount future beings’ utils, and at what rate?) and if you take any particular specification seriously you get moral claims that are wildly counterintuitive, like “insect suffering is orders of magnitude more important than heart disease in humans” or “there may be quadrillions of sentient beings in the far future, and making their lives 1% better is a better use of resources than eradicating malaria now” or “it’s morally justified to steal billions of dollars of other people’s money to give to pandemic prevention and AI safety.” And maybe these are correct claims, but they definitely don’t align with many people’s moral intuitions, and it’d be a tall task to convince those people.
Often people are justifying moral systems that make sense overall but contain individual values that are grandfathered in, but maybe don’t make as much sense as the rest. There is a resistance to the kind of clarity that could force you to question some traditional values. Slavery is a good example to think about.
I am very confused by these claims, because MacIntyre was exactly opposed to relativism, and emotivism, which he saw as characteristic of the hollow shell of modern morality [0]. He acknowledges Nietzsche's criticism of the farce of Enlightenment morals. He appealed to telos as the objective basis for ethics and morality and in that book advocated for return to Aristote.
Perhaps you misunderstand what culture is. It isn't some kind of fiction we lay on top of reality that gets in the way of reality. It is a shared language of a people about reality and one that is not static, but hopefully developing, but at the very least changing. Science is itself a part of culture. You are born into a culture, which can be anything form pretty good to downright lousy, and the "dialogue" of this culture of a people with reality, and other cultures, moves the development of this culture.
Think of all the things you have learned in the scope of science. That aggregate of learning is culture. The presuppositions that science rests on is culture. This doesn't contradict the possibility of knowing the universal. Rather, it is through the cultural that you come to know the universal and through which you are better prepared to know it. We benefit from thousands of years of cultural dialogue. We cannot attain a very high understanding of reality without immersing ourselves in this dialogue of cultures spanning human history.
(Incidentally, as MacIntyre was a Catholic convert, one thing the Catholic Church makes possible is the existence of both the particularity of ethnos and the universality of the Church; "catholic" means "universal". A multiplicity of cultures sharing in the universal, avoiding both cultural parochialism and an alienated cosmopolitanism.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Virtue
Different cultures have a lot in common and so do their morals. Culture is not arbitrary; it always has a grounding in universal human needs and features as well as somewhat variable factors such as environment.
Now I want to know whose work McIntyre described as "the philosophical equivalent of Vogue".
Richard Rorty, whose humanism and love of democracy MacIntyre despised.
Over the course of his career, MacIntyre went from an extreme left Marxist to an extreme right Thomist, and the only constant was his hatred of liberalism. He really couldn't stand the idea that people could believe in rationalism, feel the moral force of individual rights, or make purpose and meaning for themselves, all without appealing to an authoritarian source of control.
> […] all without appealing to an authoritarian source of control.
Well that was partly what After Virtue was about: arguing it wasn't possible to have an objective moral system without the supernatural.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Virtue
And he's not the only one to hold this view (many atheists do as well):
* https://global.oup.com/academic/product/atheist-overreach-97...
You're left with either Nietzsche's arbitrary will, or virtues (à la Aristotle). For the latter, MacIntyre attempted to develop a system of morality (? ethics?) based on human biology:
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/655623.Dependent_Rationa...
Once can certainly tell oneself that there is a certain purpose or meaning to one's life, but if you're a materialist, then (the argument goes (AIUI)) it's not true.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is–ought_problem
The arrangement of atoms is arbitrary and without meaning, and to call some arrangement(s) "good" or "bad" or better / worse is a value judgement that is just as arbitrary and meaningless.
He didn’t write as if he hated liberalism. Maybe he did. But in his work you get deep, principled critique from the basis of epistemology and selfhood.
Lenin wrote like someone who hates liberalism. Stephen Miller gives that vibe from the right, though I doubt he can write anything coherent at all.
Perhaps, but 20 years after Rorty's death, he's largely forgotten. I think it unlikely the same will be true of MacIntyre two-decades hence.
> Perhaps, but 20 years after Rorty's death, he's largely forgotten.
No, he's not. Not at all. Rorty has been and always will be more important, and more famous, than MacIntyre. This is not to insult MacIntyre, who was important within philosophical circles but not so much in the general public, except perhaps within religious groups, with which I'm not well acquainted.
Rorty's breadth of influence was also greater than MacIntyre's, ranging from "Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature" to "Achieving Our Country", addressing vastly different subjects and audiences.
Not to mention the huge posthumous bump that Rorty got for being labeled "The Philosopher who predicted Trump." There was even a new collection of his essays out in 2022 [0].
[0] https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691217529/wh...
I disagree with MacIntyre about a lot, both in theology and political philosophy, but I respect him for having tried to engage with both Nietzsche and the french philosophers heavily influenced by him as well as sticking by his egalitarian ethics even after the successful revolt of Reagan and the yuppies.
'When asked in 1996 what values he retained from his Marxist days, MacIntyre answered, “I would still like to see every rich person hanged from the nearest lamp post.”'
> every rich person hanged from the nearest lamp post
As the joke from the 00s went - in other news, Cisco has become today the first company to close its doors because all its employees cashed out their stock options and quit.
That is, hanging rich persons from the lamp posts is probably not the maxim that would resonate well on the HN :)
On average I think it has changed some in later years. I don't see as much eugenics and far-right apologia as I used to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alasdair_MacIntyre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Virtue
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Perhaps you're conflating faith with religion.
Faith being "confidence, trust or belief in a thing , person or concept, sometimes in the absence of proof"
Not to be confused with "blind faith" which is the above but with wilful ignorance or dismissal of proof that contradicts the aspect of the faith.
Also not to be confused with "religion" which is the social construct or organisation around a central faith.
You can have faith without religion, but you can't generally have a religion without faith.
To be clear, i'm not religious nor do i have much in the way of faith.
I just don't think faith and philosophy are mutually exclusive.
My impression of organised religion is unfavourable so I'm almost certainly biased in my perspective of religion being the reason faith gets such a bad reputation.
I am not conflating faith with religion, but the statement clearly refers to his religion...MacIntyre appeals and arguments smuggle theology in through the back door.
Presents basic commitments as if they were simply the unavoidable presuppositions of moral reasoning, yet in practice the basic commitments he privileges are those of Roman-Catholic Thomism. By treating them as axiomatic rather than doctrinal...transforms a Catholic moral vision into what looks like a neutral starting point.
Disguises an apologetic project as pure philosophy.
“At the foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements the truth of which no further reason can be given.” ― Alasdair C. MacIntyre, After Virtue
This is a very common stance in the Roman Catholic Church. The concept of “faith and reason” as two sides of the same coin both leading to truth is a pretty major teaching in the church these days.
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(checks notes on Christian theology)
Yup.
(Actually, I don't know how promptly they reckon fallen Christians will be revived.)
Actually, most christian denominations believe you go to heaven or hell(or purgatory for catholics) immediately after you die.
But some churches, like Jehovah's witnesses and adventists believe in the "soul sleep", so the soul sleeps until the second coming of Christ, then you are sent to either heaven or hell.
> most christian denominations believe you go to heaven or hell ... immediately
> some churches ... believe ... the soul sleeps until the second coming of Christ, then you are sent to either heaven or hell.
It's nuanced and a lot of Christians don't catch the nuance, but the Bible speaks both of an immediate transfer of the soul to one place or the other upon death and also of an eventual resurrection (of all souls into bodies) at the second coming, followed by final judgement.
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