Latest news with #AlasdairMacIntyre
Atlantic
08-07-2025
- Politics
- Atlantic
Why Do So Many People Think That Trump Is Good?
There's a question that's been bugging me for nearly a decade. How is it that half of America looks at Donald Trump and doesn't find him morally repellent? He lies, cheats, steals, betrays, and behaves cruelly and corruptly, and more than 70 million Americans find him, at the very least, morally acceptable. Some even see him as heroic, admirable, and wonderful. What has brought us to this state of moral numbness? I'm going to tell you a story that represents my best explanation for how America has fallen into this depressing condition. It's a story that draws heavily on the thinking of Alasdair MacIntyre, the great moral philosopher, who died in May at age 94. It's a story that tries to explain how Western culture evolved to the point where millions of us—and not just Republicans and Trump supporters—have been left unable to make basic moral judgments. The story begins a long time ago. Go back to some ancient city—say, Athens in the age of Aristotle. In that city, the question 'How do you define the purpose of your life?' would make no sense. Finding your life's purpose was not an individual choice. Rather, people grew up within a dense network of family, tribe, city, and nation. They inherited from these entities a variety of duties, responsibilities, and obligations. They also inherited a social role, serving the people around them as soldiers, farmers, merchants, mothers, teachers. Each of these social roles came with certain standards of excellence, a code to determine what they ought to do. There was an excellent way of being a warrior, a mother, a friend. In this moral system, a person sought to live up to those standards not only for the honor and money it might bring them, but because they wanted to measure up. A teacher would not let a student bribe his way to a higher grade, because that would betray the intrinsic qualities of excellence inherent in being a teacher. By being excellent at my role, I contribute to the city that formed me. By serving the intrinsic standards of my practice, I gradually rise from being the mediocre person I am toward becoming the excellent person I could be. My life is given meaning within this lifelong journey toward excellence and full human flourishing. If I do this journey well, I have a sense of identity, self-respect, and purpose. I know what I was put on this Earth to do, and there is great comfort and fulfillment in that. If all of this sounds abstract, let me give you a modern example. At his 2005 induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, the former Chicago Cub Ryne Sandberg described his devotion to the craft of baseball: 'I was in awe every time I walked onto the field. That's respect. I was taught you never, ever disrespect your opponents or your teammates or your organization or your manager and never, ever your uniform. You make a great play, act like you've done it before; get a big hit, look for the third-base coach and get ready to run the bases.' Sandberg gestured to the Hall of Fame inductees seated around him. 'These guys sitting up here did not pave the way for the rest of us so that players could swing for the fences every time up and forget how to move a runner over to third. It's disrespectful to them, to you, and to the game of baseball we all played growing up.' He continued: 'I didn't play the game right because I saw a reward at the end of the tunnel. I played it right because that's what you're supposed to do—play it right and with respect.' Sandberg's speech exemplifies this older moral code, with its inherited traditions of excellence. It conferred a moral template to evaluate the people around us and a set of moral standards to give shape and meaning to our lives. Fast-forward from ancient Athens a thousand-plus years to the Middle Ages. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam changed the standards for what constituted human excellence, placing more value on compassion and humility, but people still shared a few of the old assumptions. Individuals didn't choose their own morality—there was an essential moral order to the universe. Neither did they choose their individual life's purpose. That, too, was woven into the good of their community—to serve society in some role, to pass down their way of life, to obey divine law. Then came the 17th-century wars of religion, and the rivers of blood they produced. Revulsion toward all that contributed to the Enlightenment, with its disenchantment with religion and the valorization of reason. Enlightenment thinkers said: We can't keep killing one another over whose morality is right. Let's privatize morality. People can come up with their own values, and we will learn to live with that diversity. Crudely put, the Enlightenment took away the primacy of the community and replaced it with the primacy of the autonomous individual. It created neutral public systems such as democracy, law, and free speech to give individuals a spacious civil order within which they could figure their own life. Common morality, if it existed at all, was based on reason, not religious dogmatism, and devotion to that common order was voluntary. Utilitarianism was one such attempt at creating this kind of rational moral system—do the thing that will give people pleasure; don't do the thing that will cause others pain. I think the Enlightenment was a great step forward, producing, among other things, the American system of government. I value the freedom we now have to craft our own lives, and believe that within that freedom, we can still hew to fixed moral principles. Look at the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. if you doubt me. There's an old joke that you can tell what kind of conservative a person is by what year they want to go back to. I'd say the decline of a shared morality happened over the past 60 years with the rise of hyper-individualism and moral relativism. MacIntyre, by contrast, argued that the loss of moral coherence was baked into the Enlightenment from its start, during the 18th century. The Enlightenment project failed, he argued, because it produced rationalistic systems of morals too thin and abstract to give meaning to actual lives. It destroyed coherent moral ecologies and left autonomous individuals naked and alone. Furthermore, it devalued the very faculties people had long used to find meaning. Reason and science are great at telling you how to do things, but not at answering the fundamental questions: Why are we here? What is the ultimate purpose of my life? What is right and what is wrong? And then in the 19th and 20th centuries, along came the crew who tried to fill the moral vacuum the Enlightenment created. Nietzsche, for example, said: God is dead. We have killed him. Reason won't save us. It's up to heroic autonomous individuals to find meaning through some audacious act of will. We will become our own gods! Several decades later, Lenin, Mao, and Hitler came along, telling the people: You want some meaning in your life? March with me. Psychologists have a saying: The hardest thing to cure is the patient's attempt to self-cure. We've tried to cure the moral vacuum MacIntyre saw at the center of the Enlightenment with narcissism, fanaticism, and authoritarianism—and the cure turned out to be worse than the disease. Today, we live in a world in which many, or even most, people no longer have a sense that there is a permanent moral order to the universe. More than that, many have come to regard the traditions of moral practice that were so central to the ancient worldview as too inhibiting—they get in the way of maximum individual freedom. As MacIntyre put it in his most famous book, After Virtue, 'Each moral agent now spoke unconstrained by the externalities of divine law, natural teleology, or hierarchical authority.' Individuals get to make lots of choices, but they lack the coherent moral criteria required to make these choices well. After Virtue opens with MacIntyre's most famous thought experiment. Imagine, he writes, that somebody took all of the science books that have ever been written and shredded them. Meanwhile, all of the scientists have been killed and all of the laboratories burned down. All we are left with are some random pages from this science textbook or that. We would still have access to some scientific phrases such as neutrino or mass or atomic weight, but we would have no clue how they all fit together. Our moral life, he asserts, is kind of like that. We use words like virtue and phrases like the purpose of life, but they are just random fragments that don't cohere into a system you can bet your life on. People have been cut off from any vision of their ultimate purpose. How do people make decisions about the right thing to do if they are not embedded in a permanent moral order? They do whatever feels right to them at the moment. MacIntyre called this 'emotivism,' the idea that 'all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.' Emotivism feels natural within capitalist societies, because capitalism is an economic system built around individual consumer preferences. One of the problems with living in a society with no shared moral order is that we have no way to settle arguments. We have no objective standard by which to determine that one view is right and another view is wrong. So public arguments just go on indefinitely, at greater levels of indignation and polarization. People use self-righteous words to try to get their way, but instead of engaging in moral argument, what they're really doing is using the language of morality to enforce their own preferences. If no one can persuade anybody about right and wrong, then there are only two ways to settle our differences: coercion or manipulation. Each of us comes to regard other members of society as simply means to our ends, who can be coerced into believing what we believe. (Welcome to corporate DEI programs.) Alternatively, advertisers, demagogues, and influencers try to manipulate our emotions so we will end up wanting what they want, helping them get what they want. (Welcome to the world of that master manipulator, Donald Trump.) In the 1980s, the philosopher Allan Bloom wrote a book arguing that in a world without moral standards, people just become bland moral relativists: You do you. I'll do me. None of it matters very much. This is what Kierkegaard called an aesthetic life: I make the choices that feel pleasant at the moment, and I just won't think much about life's ultimate concerns. As MacIntyre put it, 'The choice between the ethical and the aesthetic is not the choice between good and evil, it is the choice whether or not to choose in terms of good and evil.' But the moral relativism of the 1980s and '90s looks like a golden age of peace and tranquility compared with today. Over the past 30 years, people have tried to fill the hole in their soul by seeking to derive a sense of righteousness through their political identities. And when you do that, politics begins to permeate everything and turns into a holy war in which compromise begins to seem like betrayal. Worse, people are unschooled in the virtues that are practical tools for leading a good life: honesty, fidelity, compassion, other-centeredness. People are rendered anxious and fragile. As Nietzsche himself observed, those who know why they live can endure anyhow. But if you don't know why you're living, then you fall apart when the setbacks come. Society tends to disintegrate. Ted Clayton, a political scientist at Central Michigan University, put it well: 'MacIntyre argues that today we live in a fragmented society made up of individuals who have no conception of the common good, no way to come together to pursue a common good, no way to persuade one another what the common good might be, and indeed most of us believe that the common good does not and cannot exist.' Along comes Trump, who doesn't even try to speak the language of morality. When he pardons unrepentant sleazeballs, it doesn't seem to even occur to him that he is doing something that weakens our shared moral norms. Trump speaks the languages we moderns can understand. The language of preference: I want. The language of power: I have the leverage. The languages of self, of gain, of acquisition. Trump doesn't subsume himself in a social role. He doesn't try to live up to the standards of excellence inherent in a social practice. He treats even the presidency itself as a piece of personal property he can use to get what he wants. As the political theorist Yuval Levin has observed, there are a lot of people, and Trump is one of them, who don't seek to be formed by the institutions they enter. They seek instead to use those institutions as a stage to perform on, to display their wonderful selves. So of course many people don't find Trump morally repellent. He's just an exaggerated version of the kind of person modern society was designed to create. And Democrats, don't feel too self-righteous here. If he was on your team, most of you would like him too. You may deny it, but you're lying to yourself. Few of us escape the moral climate of our age. As MacIntyre himself put it, 'The barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.' MacIntyre was a radical—both of the left and the right. He wanted us to return to the kind of coherent, precapitalist moral communities that existed before the Enlightenment project failed, locally at first and then on a larger scale. That's the project that a lot of today's post-liberals have embarked upon, building coherent communities around stronger gods—faith, family, flag. I confess I find many of the more recent post-liberals—of both left- and right-wing varieties—absurd. People who never matured past the first week of grad school can spin abstract theories about re-creating some sort of totalistic solidarity, but what post-liberalism amounts to in real life is brutal authoritarianism. (A century ago, Marxists talked in similarly lofty terms about building solidarity, but what their ideas led to in the real world was a bunch of gangster states, such as the Soviet Union.) We're not walking away from pluralism, nor should we. In fact, pluralism is the answer. The pluralist has the ability to sit within the tension created by incommensurate values. A good pluralist can celebrate the Enlightenment, democratic capitalism, and ethnic and intellectual diversity on the one and also a respect for the kind of permanent truths and eternal values that MacIntyre celebrates on the other. A good pluralist can see his or her life the way that the former Cub Ryne Sandberg saw his—subservient to a social role, willing to occasionally sacrifice immediate self-interest in order to get the runner into scoring position. Recovering from the moral scourge of Trumpism means restoring the vocabulary that people can use to talk coherently about their moral lives, and distinguish a person with character from a person without it. We don't need to entirely reject the Enlightenment project, but we probably need to recalibrate the culture so that people are more willing to sacrifice some freedom of autonomy for the sake of the larger community. We need to offer the coming generations an education in morals as rigorous as their technical and career education. As the ancients understood, this involves the formation of the heart and the will as much as the formation of the rational mind.
The Guardian
24-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Letter: Alasdair MacIntyre obituary
I was a student at Essex University in 1968 when Alasdair MacIntyre opposed its occupation by students attempting to reinstate three of their number sent down for disrupting a lecturer from Porton Down, the government's research base for chemical and biological warfare. At a mass meeting of occupying students, I said: 'Professor MacIntyre, let me read you a recent review of a book on student politics in the US. It says that when students find constitutional avenues of change blocked, they will resort to direct action, and are quite right to do so. The reviewer? Why, none other than our dean of students, Alasdair MacIntyre!' He was not best pleased and never again bought me a malt whisky in the student bar.
Irish Times
16-06-2025
- General
- Irish Times
The Gaelic philosopher who wrote ‘one of the most influential books of our time'
There are formative cultural experiences in all our lives. I'll never forget hearing The Smiths for the first time, watching The Breakfast Club, and reading Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. Alasdair who, I hear you say? For fans of the Scottish philosopher, who died last month aged 96, his barnstorming book on the future of western thought felt like an intellectual coming-of-age. 'We have – very largely, if not entirely – lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality,' he wrote. READ MORE It is not just that we are trapped in seemingly irreconcilable arguments about what's right and wrong. It's that we have lost touch with a shared language that can make reconciliation possible. So MacIntyre proclaimed in his book, first published in 1981, although that short precis of After Virtue doesn't nearly do it justice. The British writer Kenan Malik describes After Virtue as a 'brilliant, bleak, frustrating and above all provocative' work, while Irish philosopher Joseph Dunne calls it 'a coruscating critique of the ills of modernity'. MacIntyre was born in Glasgow to parents of Irish descent – 'who ensured that he learned Irish', Dunne points out. An 'active Trotskyite' for many years and a member of the Community Party in the UK, MacIntyre progressively moved away from Marx towards Aristotle and, in later life, converted to Catholicism. One constant throughout was a pride in his Gaelic roots. Dunne, who taught philosophy at St Patrick's College, Dublin City University and closely engaged with MacIntyre's work, told The Irish Times that, 'in an earlier atheist phase', MacIntyre 'had identified himself as a 'Catholic atheist' on the grounds that 'only Catholics worshipped a God worth denying'.' But what made After Virtue so special? The book begins with an arresting image. Picture the world of science experiencing a 'catastrophe' whereby 'laboratories are burnt down' and no one can provide a convincing proof that two plus two does not equal five. Something similar has happened to moral philosophy, MacIntyre argued. As religious certainties faded away, and as we abandoned traditional belief systems, we have been left with purely emotional judgments on morality. In short, we cry 'hurrah' and 'boo' at one another without any common ground. For MacIntyre the rot set in with the Enlightenment, and its promise of creating a moral framework divorced from history and community. The Enlightenment gave us two new ways of assessing ethical matters: human rights theory and utilitarianism. The former has strengthened recognition of individual freedom but it runs into trouble when competing rights clash. Utilitarianism advocates doing whatever maximises benefit and minimises harm. Reimagined as 'effective altruism', it is the favourite ethic of tech bros who claim to be making the world a better place while acting like jerks. MacIntyre called for a return to an earlier way of thinking known as virtue theory. This emphasises the need to cultivate characteristics like honesty, humility and compassion. In a unique and exhilarating twist, After Virtue wrapped this argument up in a wider critique of capitalism, the creeping managerialism of society and the coarsening of political language. Central to Alasdair MacIntyre's thinking is to resurrect the ancient Greek notion of telos or 'purpose' For someone who is hardly a household name, MacIntyre had an outsize influence on a generation of political scientists. In Malik's book The Quest for a Moral Compass: A Global History of Ethics, there are more references to MacIntyre than to George Berkeley, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Voltaire put together. But he has his critics too. Liberal commentator and author Mark Lilla says After Virtue 'turned out to be one of the most influential books of our time' – but not in a good way. 'By blurring the lines between intellectual history and philosophical argument, MacIntyre ... developed a compelling just-so story about how our dark world came to be,' Lilla writes in The Shipwrecked Mind. For liberals like Lilla, we should double down on Enlightenment values, not back away from them. When faced with monsters trampling over international human rights law, we need a stronger response than appealing to virtues. We need a system for managing conflict, along with clear rules and punishments. MacIntyre opens After Virtue with an epitaph to deceased ancestors: 'gus am bris an la', Scots Gaelic for 'until the day breaks'. The book also 'ends with a kind of prayer', Lilla observes. But prayer won't stop Vladimir Putin or Binyamin Netanyahu raining missiles down on civilians. Ultimately, MacIntyre left room for debate over how we should rehabilitate our moral thinking. After Virtue does not close off the possibility of restoring virtue theory to its rightful place in our collective reasoning, while taking the best of what both human rights theory and utilitarianism have to offer. Central to MacIntyre's thinking, however, is to resurrect the ancient Greek notion of telos or 'purpose'. The Enlightenment sidelined inquiry into purpose; searching for 'the meaning of life' itself became a figure of fun. But MacIntyre believed it was essential for humans to have a meaningful story about where they came from and where they're going. He insisted, as Dunne puts it, on 'the narrative structure of a human life'. 'I can only answer the question, 'What am I to do?',' MacIntyre wrote, 'if I can answer the prior question, 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?'.' We have become accustomed to self-help books spoon-feeding us 'lessons for life'. But a proper work of philosophy inspires us to ask better questions.
ABC News
06-06-2025
- ABC News
'A revolutionary Aristotelian': Remembering Alasdair MacIntyre (1929 – 2025) - ABC Religion & Ethics
For more than seven decades, Alasdair MacIntyre was one of the world's most prolific and provocative philosophers. His best known work is After Virtue (1981), which was lauded by Newsweek as 'a stunning new study of ethics by one of the foremost moral philosophers in the English-speaking world'. At a time when the bare alternatives were Kantian duty-based ethics and utilitarian consequentialist ethics, After Virtue revolutionised the field of moral philosophy by reintroducing virtue ethics as a viable alternative, and by calling into question — much like Elizabeth Anscombe before him — the practice of modern moral philosophy as an attempt to make sense of the shards left over from the shattered pre-modern synthesis of Athens and Jerusalem. MacIntyre's sequels Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) and his Gifford Lectures Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry (1990) defended, extended and modified the claims of After Virtue . In Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (1999), MacIntyre explored the similarities and differences between humans and non-human animals, criticising Enlightenment conceptions of the human being as insufficiently attentive to human vulnerability and interdependence. His book God, Philosophy, Universities (2009) was based on a popular undergraduate course offered during his last years of teaching, and his final book returned to the themes that had preoccupied him since 1981, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (2016). It is remarkable to consider that MacIntyre's first academic publication, 'Analogy in Metaphysics' (1951), was written before he turned 22 years old, and more than seventy years later, at the age of 93, his 2022 lecture 'The Apparent Oddity of the Universe: How to Account for It?' attracted enormous attention. MacIntyre's conversions Born in Glasgow in 1929, Alasdair MacIntyre's early imagination was fuelled by Gaelic stories of fishermen and farmers facing challenges set in a communal life. After studying classics and earning degrees from Oxford, Manchester and the University of London, MacIntyre began teaching philosophy in 1951 — a job he liked, he told his graduate students, because it was 'inside work with no heavy lifting'. 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', he said, 'but you will have to work extra hard to remain educated.' However, his prolific research won him ten honorary doctorates and appointments as Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy, and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He held academic positions at Oxford, Yale, Manchester, Leeds, Essex, University of Copenhagen, Aarhus, Brandeis, Boston University, Wellesley College, Vanderbilt, London Metropolitan University, Duke and three appointments at Princeton. But he found a lasting home at the University of Notre Dame. These frequent changes in location mirror MacIntyre's restless mind. He joined and then left the Communist party, but never abandoned a Marxist critique of a capitalist social and economic order. He attended lectures by A.J. Ayer, but reading Wittgenstein convinced MacIntyre of the weakness of Ayer's logical positivism. He found congenial, at different times, Freudianism and a non-metaphysical Aristotelianism, but later became a biologically grounded Aristotelian. MacIntyre's synthetic approach was informed by seminal figures in analytic philosophy, such as Gottlob Frege and Donald Davidson, as well as by key authors in continental philosophy, like Edith Stein and Hans Gadamer. MacIntyre's work reflected a deep familiarity with sociology, psychology, biology, psychoanalysis (especially Jacques Lacan) and literature (especially Jane Austen). 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 said he was 'a Roman Catholic atheist. Only the Catholics worshiped a God worth denying.' That too would change. As he put it: 'I was already fifty-five years old when I discovered that I had become a Thomistic Aristotelian.' After previously rejecting them, he reconsidered arguments for God's existence. In 1983, he became a Roman Catholic in faith and a Thomist in philosophy, a 'result of being convinced of Thomism while attempting to disabuse his students of its authenticity'. What impressed him, in part, was: that Aquinas — to an extent not matched by either Plato or [A.J.] Ayer — does not commit himself to accepting any particular answer to whatever question it is that he is asking, until he has catalogued all the reasonable objections to that answer that he can identify and has found what he takes to be sufficient reason for rejecting each of them. Following his example seems an excellent way of ensuring that I become adequately suspicious of any philosophical theses which I am tempted to accept. No longer Karl Barth, MacIntyre's favourite twentieth-century theologian became Joseph Ratzinger. Like other Catholic converts who were professors of philosophy — such as Elizabeth Anscombe, Nicholas Rescher and Sir Michael Dummett — MacIntyre saw no contradiction between his faith and his philosophy. Indeed, he viewed them as mutually enriching. Through all these conversions, however, MacIntyre emphasised that the study of ethics cannot be separated from history, for it is an understanding of historically situated practices within communities that is needed to make sense of moral judgements. As he wrote in A Short History of Ethics (1966): [I]t is important that we should, as far as it is possible, allow the history of philosophy to break down our present-day conceptions, so that our too narrow views of what can and cannot be thought, said, and done are discarded in the face of the record of what has been thought, said, and done. We have to steer between the danger of a dead antiquarianism, which enjoys the illusion that we can approach the past without preconceptions, and that other danger, so apparent in such philosophical historians as Aristotle and Hegel, of believing that the whole point of the past was that it should culminate with us. History is neither a prison nor a museum, nor is it a set of materials for self-congratulation. Indeed, it is the telling of stories that makes us who we are: [M]an is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. He is not essentially, but becomes through his history, a teller of stories that aspire to truth. But the key question for men is not about their own authorship; 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?' MacIntyre's acid wit MacIntyre often played the part of provocateur. Though gentler with undergraduates, in his graduate classes as well as in his scholarly writings Alasdair exhibited an acerbic wit. He described the work of one philosopher as 'the philosophical equivalent of Vogue '. In a review of Hans Küng's book Does God Exist? , MacIntyre remarked: [R]eading this book was not entirely without theological significance for me. Whenever in future I try to imagine what Purgatory will be like, the thought of having to reread Dr Küng's book is certain to recur. On another occasion, he said that 'modern Roman Catholic theologians have been to an alarming degree narcissistic', giving the 'impression of being only mildly interested in either God or the world; what they are passionately interested in are other Roman Catholic theologians.' As an article in The Nation noted: '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'.' Even the philosopher who had perhaps the greatest influence on him did not escape his caustic barbs: 'Aristotle was not a nice or a good man: the words 'supercilious prig' spring to mind very often in reading the Ethics .' In the classroom, MacIntyre followed the example of Socrates, who demonstrated to those in his company the depths of what they did not know. My first graduate class with him was on twentieth-century ethics. I read all the books for the fall semester the summer before, so I thought I was ready to impress. On the first day of class, he began in stern British schoolmaster style, 'I'm Alasdair MacIntyre, but if you don't already know that, you probably shouldn't be in this class.' Unlike other professors, he did not address us as 'Christopher' or 'Rebecca', but as 'Mr Kaczor' and 'Ms DeYoung'. The only exception was 'Master Resnick', who had gained his MA already. MacIntyre announced that in order to earn an A on a paper, we would have to write an essay of the calibre that he would put his own name on it. An A minus meant he would almost put his name on it. My first paper came back with a grade that I had never before received. Indeed, a grade I had never before seen : B minus minus . A philosophical version of a drill sergeant, MacIntyre left us in much better shape than when we began. As Lee Marsh put it, 'When I met Alasdair MacIntyre, I realized how much I did not know and why I should know it.' We learned that there was such a thing as a stupid question. One graduate student asked, 'What are the Thirty-Nine Articles?' MacIntyre replied, 'Do you happen to know where the library is? It's not too late to learn.' We were continually kept off balance, often not knowing where the jokes ended and the serious warnings began. One day, Alasdair announced, 'I happen to be one who believes torture is not always wrong — something you may want to remember.' He warned us, 'Never call me at home unless you want to no longer be a student in the graduate program.' This admonition was entirely unnecessary because most of us were afraid to speak with him, even during class time. Graduate students brave enough to visit his office, dark as a cave and lit by a solitary lamp, found it adorned with a Celtic cross and a photo of the Jewish-born philosopher Edith Stein, who died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. One day, having finally earned better paper grades in his '20th Century Ethics' course, as well as in his course on 'Practical Rationality', I ventured into his office to ask for his coveted letter of recommendation. It took courage to request one. He told one graduate student, 'I can certainly write you a letter, but it is the kind of letter that keeps you from getting a job.' Fortunately, his letter of recommendation for me did not keep me from getting my first job, nor my current job. Not only did he help us on the job market, MacIntyre's virtues gave his students an example to emulate. When doing a directed readings class with one undergraduate, MacIntyre remarked that there was a recent article in French very much relevant for their discussion. Unfortunately, the student couldn't read French. So the next time they met together, MacIntyre provided the student with a translation he had made of the article. Alasdair had a great love for American football, especially Notre Dame football. Yet he often gave graduate students his football tickets — and this was during the Lou Holtz-era when the Fighting Irish were perennial national championship contenders. His students saw him debating with Sir Bernard Williams about rival interpretations of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex — a battle of titans who learned their Greek as youths. And we saw him at Mass in Notre Dame's Basilica of the Sacred Heart on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, standing off at a distance from the altar and honouring the Mother of God. MacIntyre's ladder MacIntyre often joked that his most significant achievement was breaking up the Beatles. Conventional wisdom has it 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 himself 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. What I do know is this. I have never met, nor do I ever expect to meet again, a philosopher as fascinating as the author of After Virtue . If we are waiting for Godot, he may well arrive before another — doubtless very different — Alasdair MacIntyre. Christopher Kaczor Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University, and an Honorary Professor for the Renewal of Catholic Intellectual Life at the Word on Fire Institute. He was appointed a Member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, a visiting fellow at the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame, and William E. Simon Visiting Fellow at Princeton University. An earlier version of this article appeared on Word on Fire.
Wall Street Journal
06-06-2025
- General
- Wall Street Journal
Humanity According to Alasdair MacIntrye
One of the world's greatest Catholic philosophers died May 21. Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre was 96. Normally classified as a philosopher of ethics, MacIntyre was a fierce critic of modern ethical theory. His writings drew deeply from a wide array of fields, including theology, social science, psychology, history and literature, but he never pursued a doctorate. Born in Glasgow, he received master's degrees from Manchester and Oxford, later telling a student: 'I won't go so far as to say that you have a deformed mind if you have a Ph.D., but you will have to work extra hard to remain educated.'
