Alasdair MacIntyre: Virtue, Practices, Identity, and Traditions

This chapter explores the intervention that Alasdair MacIntyre brought to moral thought in the 1980s. MacIntyre not only delivered seminal critiques of Enlightenment moral philosophy but also reorientated moral thought towards the social. The chapter begins by expounding MacIntyre’s critiques of Enlightenment moral philosophy, indicating the continued importance these arguments have to understanding problems associated with abstracting moral theorising from culture and history. An additional appeal of MacIntyre’s arguments from a social theory perspective is how he developed his conceptualisations of virtue in relation to concepts of practices and identities. MacIntyre stresses the necessity of moral theorising to engage with sociological concepts and perspectives throughout his work. How successful he is in doing this with regard to his applications of practices and identity is discussed in the middle section of this chapter. The final section explores MacIntyre’s more recent Dependent Rational Animals and its contribution to understanding moral living in relation to human flourishing.