Exam season is now looming in Cambridge, and I found myself yesterday morning in the gratifying position of urging undergraduates immersed in moral philosophy’s canonical figures not to neglect its contemporary titans. In any essay on Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume or Kant, I suggested, there would always be an opportunity to offer an insight that could be buttressed by simply inscribing “MacIntyre 1981” in brackets afterwards — and there could be no surer way of eliciting an approving nod from an examiner than that.

Why? Because Alasdair MacIntyre, who — I learned a few hours later — has passed away at the age of 96, was without question one of the most significant moral philosophers of the second half of the 20th century. By any measure, the impact of After Virtue (MacIntyre 1981) on Anglophone moral philosophy was electrifying. A scathing critique of modern moral philosophy, which he had come to view as a post-apocalyptic shadow of the richer and more coherent moral traditions that had preceded the dawn of liberalism, the book remains an extraordinary demonstration of the degree to which the thought of the past can catalyse thought in the present. After MacIntyre, no one can deny that the most convincing expressions of post-liberalism will always be those that draw on pre-liberal traditions.

After Virtue’s stunning opening chapter decried the Enlightenment’s doomed attempt to ground morality in reason alone, which in turn had led modernity to unmoor itself from the moral grammar of the past and to cast itself adrift in confused conceptions of ethics as calculations of utility or expressions of fleeting subjective preference. In response, MacIntyre called for a return to virtue ethics that grounded normativity in narrative, for — as he once famously put it — “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 confounded both the Right and the Left. His unfashionable affirmation of historical continuity, as well as his insistence that normativity must be grounded in narrative, resonated with champions of tradition and natural law as much as his subtle application of Marxist insights energised advocates of social criticism. Yet he also lamented what he saw as the inconsistency of the Right’s tendency to fetishise economic freedom while deploring it in matters of morals. Liberals, he complained, had confected a meaningless moral Esperanto from the fragments of post-Enlightenment discourse, a language that was meant to be understood by all and so could be understood by none.

Fuller encomia will follow. It is enough for now to note that MacIntyre’s passing marks the closing of a frenetic but fruitful chapter in the history of moral philosophy. What’s more, at a time when his warnings that ethical disputes descended long ago into dialogues of the deaf have rarely seemed more urgent, his is a grievous loss. His writings, which comprise dozens of monographs and articles in an astonishingly prolific career that continued well into his tenth decade, demand engagement and repay it immediately. There can be no doubt that his legacy will linger long beyond the examination scripts of the next generation.

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James Orr is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Cambridge and Chair of the Edmund Burke Foundation UK.

jtworr

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