Alasdair MacIntyre: An Appreciation

By Robert Mixa

Alasdair MacIntyre, renowned Catholic moral philosopher, has died. Yet he leaves behind a legacy in the world of ideas that is hard to overestimate.

My encounter with Alasdair MacIntyre began serendipitously during my senior year of college, while browsing the shelves of Saint Louis University's library. Amid the stacks, I came upon a book titled After Virtue—its title alone was intriguing, even slightly provocative. At the time, I was deep in the weeds of my undergraduate thesis, ambitiously attempting to justify Catholic sexual ethics in terms of a universal ethic. Yet I found myself increasingly frustrated. Arguing for the Church's teachings in a way that seemed philosophically indubitable felt nearly impossible.

Two problems haunted me. First, conversations with peers—many of them non-practicing Catholics or secular-minded—felt like dialogues between strangers. We mostly used the same moral vocabulary, but our meaning were worlds apart. Second, many of those same peers seemed to assume that moral claims were little more than emotional preferences—expressions of taste, not reason. Conflict was not only uncomfortable; it felt philosophically irresolvable.

Reading After Virtue was like finding a map of the intellectual terrain I had been stumbling through in the dark. MacIntyre confirmed what I had sensed: modern moral discourse is fragmented, often incoherent, and deprived of the rich tradition that once grounded it. We still speak of "justice," "virtue," or "the good," but these words have become hollow—fragments of a language no longer tethered to a shared narrative or vision of human flourishing. MacIntyre helped me see that meaningful discourse depends not just on concepts but on the practices, narratives, and traditions that give them life.

From that moment on, MacIntyre became a guide in my intellectual formation. I made pilgrimages to the Center for Ethics and Culture's Fall Conference at Notre Dame, where MacIntyre would give the keynote. I still remember his anecdote about Northern Ireland: how, when stopped by a gang and asked, "Catholic or Protestant?", an atheist who answer "neither" might be met with, "Yes, but are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?" It was a joke—but also a deep insight. Even disbelief, MacIntyre suggested, is shaped by the religious and cultural traditions one inhabits.

That insight prompted reflection on my own experiences in different cultures—particularly Spain and Poland, where I have lived for extended periods. Compared to parts of the United States I know well (outside what used to be certain Catholic enclaves in Chicago), there was something distinctive in how Catholicism shaped—even in its decline—the moral and cultural imagination. American Catholics I met were often devout, often more so than their European counterparts. But there remained a subtle difference in how the faith was culturally embedded, how it formed the texture of everyday life. And while Catholics, no matter where they are from, are never at home in this world there is something about contemporary culture that cuts people off from authentic communities and traditions essential to human flourishing. I'm still trying to articulate that difference, but I suspect MacIntyre was pointing to it too.

Some American Catholics might find my fascination with Europe misplaced: isn't Europe more secular the U.S.? Have not European powers persecuted the Catholic Church more than the United States? Isn't Catholicism in Europe often more ethnic than theological, a fading cultural identity? I share those concerns—Poland, for instance, is increasingly shaped by consumerist secularism. Yet even so, these ancient and medieval cultures still retain a kind of broken memory—a fractured tradition and a sense of the past that, despite everything, remains amenable to Catholicism in ways that much of the modern West is not. If there was an answer to today's malaise, although he did not like solutions and recipes, MacIntyre placed his hopes in what is most immediate to all of us: the family. For him, politics, while necessary, often cannot adequately address the problems of societal breakdown in a way that local communities, particularly the extended family, can. But family life can only flourish if its members undertake certain practices, like the art of family conversation or simply visiting the graves of deceased relatives, that bring with it a sense of the past. And there are still many communities in Europe, such as in Poland, that cultivate and cherish that sense of the past.

MacIntyre was often characterized as a pessimist, teetering on the edge of despair. Yet in his illuminating essay "The Anti-Integralist Alasdair MacIntyre", Caleb Bernacchio draws attention to several passages in MacIntyre's work that pulse with hope. One such moment comes when MacIntyre writes, "St. Paul and St. Thomas Aquinas tell us how there is always more to be hoped for in any and every situation that the empirical facts seem to show."

 At the conclusion of Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, MacIntyre offers words I frequently revisit when the task before me feels futile:

"Those most prone to accuse others of utopianism are generally those men and women of affairs who pride themselves upon their pragmatic realism, who look for immediate results, who want the relationship between present input and output to be predictable and measurable, and that is to say, a matter of the shorter, indeed the shortest run. They are enemies of the incalculable, the skeptics about all expectations which outrun what they take to be hard evidence, the deliberately shortsighted who congratulate themselves upon the limits of their vision...It may be therefore that the charge of utopianism is sometimes best understood more as a symptom of the condition of those who level it than an indictment of the projects against which it is directed."

Though I never had the privilege of studying under MacIntyre, I remain deeply grateful for his influence. He helped me make sense of a moral world that often seems disoriented and rootless. While I've come to questions some of his positions as I've read more deeply into the subjects he engages and wish he was a bit more metaphysical, his contribution to the intellectual life of our age is, I believe, unmatched. A man torn between loyalty and criticism for the academy he served, MacIntyre will—when the history of philosophy in our time is written—surely be remembered as one of its towering figures.