Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, published in 1981, is the most important work of moral philosophy in the English-speaking world in the second half of the twentieth century and one of the most sustained philosophical engagements with the relationship between biblical tradition and ethical reasoning. MacIntyre diagnoses what he sees as the catastrophic disorder of contemporary moral discourse - its interminable, unresolvable character - as the consequence of the Enlightenment's failure to replace the Aristotelian and biblical conception of the human telos (the goal or purpose toward which human beings are ordered) that it had rejected. Without a shared account of what human beings are for, moral language loses its coherence, becoming no more than the expression of personal preferences or emotional attitudes. MacIntyre's proposed remedy - a recovery of Aristotelian virtue ethics within the context of narrative tradition, culminating (in later works) in an endorsement of Thomistic Augustinianism - makes After Virtue an indirect but powerful argument for the indispensability of biblical anthropology to moral philosophy.
The Thinker and His Work
MacIntyre (born 1929) has had one of the most philosophically unusual careers of the twentieth century: a Marxist in his youth, a Freudian at one stage, a Wittgensteinian at another, a defender of Trotskyism against Stalinism, and then - with dramatic suddenness in the late 1970s - a Catholic convert and Thomist. After Virtue marks the transition: it is still written in a largely secular idiom (the explicit Thomism comes in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? in 1988 and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry in 1990), but its diagnosis of the moral disorder of modernity is already shaped by the conviction that only a comprehensive tradition of practice, narrative, and social embodiment can sustain genuine moral reasoning - and that the tradition best equipped for this is the one rooted in Aristotle as read through Augustine and Aquinas.
Biblical Texts Engaged
Matthew 5:3-12 (the Beatitudes) appears in MacIntyre's discussion of the virtues as examples of how the biblical tradition identifies particular human excellences - meekness, mercy, purity of heart, peacemaking - as constitutive of the good life. MacIntyre treats this as continuous with (though transforming) the Aristotelian virtue tradition: the Beatitudes specify a set of character dispositions whose intelligibility depends on a narrative account of human life oriented toward the Kingdom of God.
Romans 12:2 - 'Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect' - captures the moral epistemology that MacIntyre argues is required for virtue: moral knowledge is not achieved by the individual reason operating in abstraction from tradition, but by a mind formed within a community of practice, capable of discerning what is good through participation in that community's ongoing narrative.
1 Corinthians 13:13 - 'So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love' - represents, for MacIntyre, the specifically Christian addition to the Aristotelian virtue catalogue: the theological virtues (faith, hope, charity) that transform and orient the natural virtues within the narrative of divine grace and eschatological fulfillment.
Core Argument
MacIntyre opens After Virtue with a thought experiment: imagine that a catastrophe destroys natural science, and the subsequent civilization possesses only fragments of scientific language and methodology without the theoretical context that makes them intelligible. This, he argues, is our actual situation in moral philosophy: we possess the fragments of a moral vocabulary developed within now-abandoned teleological frameworks, and we use these fragments as if they had determinate meaning, generating the endless, irresolvable moral debates that characterize modern public life.
The remedy is not a return to naive tradition but a recovery, through critical inquiry, of a tradition that can sustain coherent moral practice. MacIntyre argues for three key concepts: virtue (a developed human quality that enables its possessor to achieve the goods internal to a practice), practice (a coherent, complex cooperative activity that realizes standards of excellence internal to itself), and narrative (the story form in terms of which the unity of a human life must be understood). These concepts require a background understanding of human nature and its telos - its goal or end - that the Enlightenment rejected.
MacIntyre's famous conclusion invokes St. Benedict: '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... We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another - and doubtless very different - St. Benedict.'
Intellectual Context
MacIntyre was writing against the background of the dominant ethical theories of analytic philosophy - G.E. Moore's intuitionism, R.M. Hare's prescriptivism, and the utilitarian and Kantian frameworks that competed for dominance in Anglo-American ethics. He argued that all these theories share the Enlightenment's rejection of teleology and are therefore incapable of providing a coherent account of why anything matters morally. His turn to Aristotle and then to Aquinas was a rejection of the entire analytic ethical tradition in favor of the pre-Enlightenment tradition it had abandoned.
Reception and Critique
After Virtue generated enormous debate. Martha Nussbaum, while broadly sympathetic to virtue ethics, argued that MacIntyre's account of tradition was too conservative and insufficiently attentive to the ways in which traditions perpetuate injustice. Jeffrey Stout's Ethics After Babel (1988) argued that modern moral discourse, while fragmented, is more coherent than MacIntyre claimed, and that the liberal tradition has resources for moral reasoning that do not require a single comprehensive teleology. John Rawls and his followers argued that the liberal political tradition's refusal to appeal to comprehensive doctrines (including religious and Aristotelian ones) was precisely its virtue, not its vice - it enables political cooperation across deep moral disagreements.
From within Christian philosophy, Stanley Hauerwas was MacIntyre's most constructive dialogue partner, developing the account of the Church as a narrative community that sustains virtue in a post-Constantinian world. Hauerwas's 'ecclesial ethics' is the most explicitly biblical appropriation of MacIntyre's framework.
Legacy
After Virtue revived virtue ethics as a major option in moral philosophy after decades of Kantian and utilitarian dominance. It established narrative as an irreducible category for moral philosophy and brought the history of ethics into the center of ethical theory. Its implicit argument for the indispensability of tradition - and ultimately of the Thomistic Augustinian tradition - for moral reasoning has made it the most important philosophical resource for Catholic and broadly classical Protestant ethics in the contemporary academy.
Key Passages
'A virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods.' (After Virtue, ch. 14)
'I can only answer the question "What am I to do?" if I can answer the prior question "Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?"' (After Virtue, ch. 15)
Contemporary Relevance
MacIntyre's diagnosis of liberal moral discourse as incoherent has become more rather than less persuasive as the culture wars have intensified and as the assumption that rational argument can resolve moral disagreements has been increasingly challenged. His claim that genuine moral reasoning requires formation within a tradition - that it cannot be done by abstract individuals using only their native rational endowment - speaks to the growing recognition that character formation, community, and narrative identity are not peripheral to ethics but central to it. His influence can be seen in contemporary communitarianism, in Catholic social ethics, in the ethics of care tradition, and in the growing field of virtue ethics in medical and professional ethics.