From Voluntarist Nominalism to Rationalism to Chaos: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Critique of Modern Ethics

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to connect the ‘Disquieting Suggestion’ at the beginning of After Virtue to a broader picture of Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of modern moral philosophy. The essay begins with MacIntyre’s fictional scientific catastrophe, and uses four passages from the text of After Virtue to identify the analogous real philosophical catastrophe. The essay relates the resulting critique of modern moral philosophy to MacIntyre’s concern for recognizing the social practices of morality as human actions in “Notes from the Moral Wilderness”. The essay concludes by considering the implications of MacIntyre’s philosophy for the study of history, realism, and tradition.