After Virtue

A study in moral theory that opens with a thought experiment: imagine the natural sciences destroyed and later rebuilt from fragments whose meaning has been lost. MacIntyre suggests that modern moral language is in a similar state, which is why moral disputes, about war, abortion or justice, are interminable. He traces this to the failure of the Enlightenment project of justifying morality without a shared idea of human purpose, through Kierkegaard, Kant, Hume and Diderot, and describes a culture effectively governed by emotivism, embodied in characters such as the manager and the therapist. The choice, he argues, is between Nietzsche and Aristotle. He then rebuilds an account of the virtues in three stages: practices with goods internal to them, the narrative unity of a human life, and living traditions. The book ends by saying that we await not a Godot but a new St Benedict. Critics have charged it with nostalgia for a lost moral order and with relativism.

It helped revive virtue ethics and fed the communitarian critique of liberalism, a label MacIntyre rejects, and its diagnosis of why moral arguments seem endless remains widely discussed.