From the periphery: Alistair MacIntyre
To mark the Scottish philosophers passing, Stephen Watt writes a brief survey of his contribution to western thought and how his Scottishness was part of what drove it.
Alasdair MacIntyre who died on 21 May 2025 was Scotland’s leading philosopher and a practising Catholic convert. Born on 12 January 1929 in Glasgow, he was educated and worked in English universities until emigrating to America in 1970. He taught in a variety of US institutions, until his retirement in 2010 from his position as Senior Research Professor in the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. He remained philosophically active even in retirement. Quite apart from his geographical wanderings, his intellectual and personal life also display considerable movement. He was married three times, divorced twice, and moved back and forth between varieties of Christianity, atheism and Marxism until finally converting to Catholicism in 1983.
MacIntyre was perhaps popularly best known for his gripping picture of a modern world in cultural ruins, still using the language of morality but without the conceptual schemes that gave that language significance. Moreover, his prescription for surviving this catastrophe -the founding of communities which could embody a coherent intellectual and moral life analogous to the founding by St Benedict of monasteries- took on a life of its own as the Benedict Option. [1] However, such a focus doesn’t do justice to the depths of his thought. Although his restlessness makes it difficult to summarise neatly his philosophy, several themes recur, particularly in that period of work defined by the publication of After Virtue (1981), Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990). [2] Throughout his career, the critique of political liberalism as an avoidance of harms rather than the pursuit of the good is central, with an attempt to analyse what sort of society would facilitate that pursuit, rather than abandoning that quest to isolated individuals dependent solely on their own resources.
Key elements in that analysis are the concepts of a practice and of a tradition. A practice is a way of life that allows its members to develop the virtues that will give their lives access to the goods of human flourishing: prime examples of this would include the professions and farming. Turning to the other key concept of ‘tradition’, MacIntyre introduces it as follows:
What the Enlightenment made us for the most part blind to and what we now need to recover, is, so I shall argue, a conception of rational inquiry as embodied in a tradition, a conception according to which the standards of rational justification themselves emerge from and are part of a history in which they are vindicated by the way in which they transcend the limitations of and provide remedies for the defects of their predecessors within the history of that same tradition. [3]
Taking a step back from the details of MacIntyre’s texts, the overall picture is something like this. Human beings learn to flourish through a form of life which is social not individual. Such forms of life develop a more or less conscious awareness of themselves and can use that awareness to improve and defend themselves. This analysis contrasts with an Enlightenment understanding of rationality which resists the community aspect of rationality and reflection in favour of that of individuals. Moreover, such an Enlightenment understanding ignores and even actively resists the inheritance of the past in tradition, instead preferring a version of reason that ignores the peculiarities of local circumstances and histories in favour a universal understanding of what it is to be rational. As noted above, that Enlightenment understanding becomes, in liberalism, a focus on the avoidance of harms, with individuals being left to decide what goods to pursue purely based on whatever desires or needs they happen to identify themselves as having.
Although the details of this central analysis do develop -and it is hard to deny that much of MacIntyre’s argument is impressionistic rather than detailed- the main lines of what made MacIntyre such a well-known figure in philosophy are relatively clear. There is an attack on modernity particularly in its liberal and progressive forms for failing to articulate or support the flourishing human life. There is a diagnosis of that failure in modernity’s Enlightenment heritage which emphasises the universality of human reason across times and cultures and its dismissal of rationality as rooted in particular times, places and traditions. Moreover, there is increasingly in his work an emphasis on Aristotelianism and in particular the version of Aristotelianism developed by St Thomas Aquinas as being the intellectual tradition which is best placed to cure this failure and provide the basis for social forms which support human flourishing. This positive aspect of MacIntyre’s work is perhaps most clearly addressed in what is my personal favourite of all his books, Dependent Rational Animals (1999). [4]
Although MacIntyre’s adult years were spent mostly outside Scotland, the importance of the country to the self-narration of his life remained extremely important:
My ancestors lived in small communities in Northern Ireland and in the West of Scotland - my father, was one of the first generation of his family not to learn English as a second language. In other words, I come from the fringes of modern Western culture and have tried to give a clear voice to some of those people who do not belong to the dominant mainstream and cannot identify with it. [5]
As well as being a reservoir of pre-modernity in ‘small, ideal fishing communities’ [6], Scotland is also the arena for the creation of modernity in MacIntyre’s account of the creation and disintegration of one of the three main traditions covered in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?. Covering approximately four chapters and some 120 pages of that volume, MacIntyre surveys the development and decline of one of the chief sources of modern liberalism: a Scottish philosophy of Common Sense based on the vision of a society where
[a]ll plain persons of sound mind assent to one and the same set of fundamental truths as underived first principles, the truth of common sense, as soon as these truths are elicited from the mind by experience. [7]
As MacIntyre goes on to note, such a conception not only requires no specific social setting -the assent to truths depends only on sound minds- but soon finds itself undermined in the twentieth century when confronting ‘social contexts of fundamental disagreement and conflict’.
MacIntyre’s work while lauded in American and English circles seems to have had little direct impact on public life in Scotland. We are probably above all that, having moved into a progressive, secularised utopia where we all agree and where a concentration on the Central Belt removes anything that might reek of fishing communities, idealised or not. We do not like deep thinkers especially of a conservative hue. We prefer politics as the calculation of campaigners rather than as the basis for practical wisdom. Catholicism of course is simply too embarrassing to mention except as adding sectarian spice to football. But it is rather a pity, to say the least, that a philosopher who is an ‘eminent case’, embodying ‘a long and complex intellectual trajectory’ [8] and throwing light on so many issues afflicting the modern world is so little thought about in his native land.
Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon him.
And may we, particularly in Scotland, learn from him.
By Stephen Watt