Macintyre’s “Critical” Place And Nature Of Virtue Ethics Within The Modern Moral System

Abstract

This article examines the criticisms directed by the contemporary philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who passed away in 2025, toward modern moral understanding and his efforts to reconstruct a virtue ethics grounded in Aristotelian principles. Beginning with After Virtue and continuing through his final work, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, MacIntyre criticizes the individualist, detached from practice, and isolated from social bonds character of modern moral theories and argues that these theories lack a common understanding of the “good life.” According to MacIntyre, modern moral theories (as can be clearly seen in Kant and Kantian philosophers, utilitarians, Hume and neo-Humeans, Nietzsche and Nietzscheans, Moore, and existentialist philosophers such as Kierkegaard and Sartre) center on individual preferences and subjective attitudes, excluding social practices and the understanding of telos (final end). This article addresses MacIntyre’s neo-Aristotelian critique of modern moral theories and attempts to explain the fundamental structure of ethics in MacIntyre’s work through the concept of “criticism” that is free from dogmatism. In this context, we will attempt to show that MacIntyre developed his virtue ethics as a paradigm compatible with a secular community understanding that is distinct from a dogmatic, religion-based community understanding and different from contemporary liberal understandings.