Alasdair MacIntyre and liberalism: a literature summary Author: Doctor Terence Rajivan Edward Draft version: version 4 (7th August 2026; v1 6th August 2026) Note: the new British prime minister seems close to MacIntyre in political philosophy. Will summarize more later, hopefully. Bernard Williams review of After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Sunday Times 1981. MacIntyre claims that our morality does not work in the modern world. It is being undermined by a modern society which opposes "a bureaucratic and technical world on the one hand, and mere privacy, the world of the individual, on the other. This encourages us to think of ourselves,in relation to morality, in purely individualist terms,and as not essentially related to any social structure or institutional duties." MacIntyre says that the choice is between rehabilitating Aristotle or turning to Nietzsche, who believed there is no coherent basis for moral thought. MacIntyre favours Aristotle: a morality grounded in virtues, which appeals to the concepts of a practice, a narrative order, and a moral tradition. A proper life for humans requires a proper society. Williams complains about jumpy or underdeveloped arguments. Williams rejects MacIntyre''s historical claims that it is because of modern society that we have this individualistic idea of a pure moral self, independent of social institutions: it appears in Plato, Christianity, and Kant. MacIntyre associates the problem of vindicating morality against egoism with the 18th century, when it was discussed by Plato and Socrates. Williams says MacIntyre offers nostalgic historical fantasy. (Nostalgic for a previous time based on a false history!) And if we must choose between Aristotle and Nietzsche, Williams is interested in Nietzsche. Bernard Williams review of Whose Justice? Which Rationality? 1989, London Review of Books. Williams begins with summary of earlier MacIntyre: "Alasdair MacIntyre claimed that the ideas of justice available in the modern world are like a pile of ruins, historical fragments that can make no coherent sense." MacIntyre treats discussions of the just distribution of goods in a society as a waste of time because "we have no tradition or coherent set of ethical conceptions by which they might be decided or even advanced. All we have is endless disagreement and the sway of power and political fortune. This hopeless lack of intellectual and ethical resources applies not only to questions about inequality of property, income and power, but just as much to other issues that touch on justice, such as the death penalty, abortion or affirmative action." His new book is much more intellectual history than philosophy. The book seeks to support earlier historical claims by studying 3 traditions: "One running from Homer to Aristotle and passing through Arab and Jewish writers to St Thomas Aquinas; another, Biblical, tradition that came to Aquinas from St Augustine; and a third that informed Scottish thought in the 17th and 18th centuries." MacIntyre is learned but makes his own peculiar selections. He focuses a lot on Scottish history leading up to the Enlightenment, when the other traditions he discusses have more claim to our attention, thinks Williams. "The hero of the story is a figure barely known except to specialists, a judge named Sir James Dalrymple of Stair, who argued, as against what was to be the dominant English view in the 18th century, that property rights could properly be limited in various cases. " MacIntyre's favoured tradition was destroyed by the Enlightenment, with Hume contributing, whom MacIntyre detests: "for his Toryism, for his desertion of Scotland and toadying to the English, for his insincerity in seeking academic appointments for which a profession of Calvinist Christianity was necessary, and—perhaps more than anything else—for his rejection of that Christianity and his hatred of 'the monkish virtues'." Nothing his said about Adam SMith, despite his enormous influence. "There are, in MacIntyre's view, no ideas of justice or practical reason that are not relative to some tradition or other, and the attempt to identify and use such ideas independently of any tradition at all is precisely the main cause of our modern confusions, expressed in the ruinous outlook of liberalism." MacIntyre does not go further in his criticisms of liberalism than this and Williams accuses him of inconsistency: liberalism fails to understand itself, but do so other traditions, for MacIntyre, so why be so harsh on it? Williams finds MacIntyre case for practical reason being traditional-relative to be weak. Not every disagreement between people, e.g. over the merits of patriotism, is a disagreement about the nature of practical reason. How can we even understand others if there is little common ground? Williams is not convinced by MacIntyre's claim that it is a peculiarity of the modern world that wanting to do something gives a reason to someone to do that. Also there is a question of whether MacIntyre needs a millenial disaster to pursue his Thomist political vision! Martha C. Nussbaum 1989. Recoiling from Reason. The New York Review of Books. MacIntyre and Nussbaum are both much influenced by Aristotle, but I don't have access to the Nussbaum piece. Kirstin Shrader-Frechette, 2002. Natural Rights and Human Vulnerability: Aquinas, Macintyre, and Rawls. Public Affairs Quarterly 16(2): 99-124. Available at: https://sites.nd.edu/kristin-shrader-frechette/files/2025/01/2002-Natural-Rights-and-Human-Vulnerability-PAQ.pdf In Dependent Rational Animals, MacIntyre criticizes Western tradition's inattention to human vulnerability: illness physical and mental,lack of nutrition, being victim to aggression, and neglect. Apart from Amy Gutmann, no one has responded to MacIntyre's arguments against Jefferson, Rawls, and the human rights tradition, of naturaland inaleniable rights: "because Maclntyre's ethics focuses on tradition-dependent norms, because there is a 400-year-old human-rights tradition, and because that tradition appears to include Maclntyre's requisite institutions and practices, he bears the burden of proof for rejecting rights and for making good on his 1999 claim to protect vulnerable people." MacIntyre claims: "First, there was a move from a "teleological order... at once created and commanded by God," to the notion of rights as justified by their being self-evident or by their arising from utilitarian or contractarian notions. Second, rights were taken "to attach to individuals, qua individuals, and not to individuals qua members of a particular community." Third, such rights defined "a standpoint held to be more fundamental than any provided by participation in or membership in social groups." Fourth, rights became "secular and nontheological. . . [and were said to] outweigh any claims which do appeal to theological considerations." MacIntyre's witch argument is that as we don't have good reason to think witches exist, so we don't have good reason to think rights exist. Gutmann responds that witch explanations lost out to physics, but natural rights have not lost out in competition. Kristin Shrader-Frechette adds this: MacIntyre has not surveyed all past attempts to establish rights, for example Rawls. MacIntyre's taboo argument is that as polynesians use "taboo" to mean prohibited without any further understanding, so we use "right" to mean moral trump, without any further understanding. Because we have lost the history and context, both taboo and natural right are unintelligble fictions." But have we lost the history and social context, the rules and practices, associated with the word "rights"? As Gutmann points out, "our societal practices - of striving for equality of educational opportunity, for careers open to talent, and for punishment conditional on intent - show both our commitment to defending human rights and that we have practices to support them." Shrader-Frechette extends the argument by identifying "people know the historic rights struggles of blacks, women, gays, and children. They know what it was to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the nineteenth amendment giving woment the right to vote." Shrader-Frechette identifies a third argument, which she says underlies the previous two: the commonality argument. "Rational debate over the application of moral . . . concepts, requires that there be some standard, independent of the desires, preferences, and will of the contending parties, to which appeal can be made... [Human] rights cannot provide part of such a shared rational standard because rights proponents have been unable to refute their rivals. He says they have been unable to justify rights on grounds of self evidence, utility, or contractarianism." Shrader-Frechette responds that MacIntyre is inconsistent: he appeals to the Thomist tradition at the foundation of his philosophy, but its proponents accept natural rights and appeal to them. Shrader-Frechette also disputes MacIntyre's objection to Rawls. MacIntyre asks, "when the veil of ignorance is removed... what rational grounds do I have?" Shrader-Frechette argues that Rawls's original position model does not ignore all our qualities, allowing us to appeal to shared ones, which support endorsing the principles after the experiment." Maclntyre's attack on Rawls also is troubling because he presupposes that only an external religious authority could provide an adequate foundation for the categorical character of moral claims, like those of rights." When arguing that proponents of human rights have not been able to refute rivals, MacIntyre considers Thomas Jefferson as well as Rawls. MacIntyre considers Jefferson's claim that "anyone has a natural right to do that which no one else has a right to prevent him from doing or to interfere with doing." MacIntyre objects that this already presupposes there are natural rights and cannot establish them. Shrader-Frechette defends Jefferson as grounding natural rights in human nature. Another objection from MacIntyre is that Jefferson implies the overriding nature of natural rights but does nothing to establish this. Shrader-Frechette again defends Jefferson, saying that human rights have this overriding quality because of how they are grounded in human nature: "one cannot override what one has by virtue of one's nature". Shrader-Frechette discusses the commonality argument some more and then moves to a fourth argument, namely the primacy argument: we lack reason to thinks rights have primacy over the good. This argument appears in MacIntyre's review of Rawls's A Theory of Justice. A quotation: "Might we not rather ask first, 'What is the good for man?' and only then decide what justice would be in a society where men might realize that good?" Shrader-Frechette says that her earlier defence of Rawls against the commonality argument applies to the primacy argument as well. Another problem she raises is that "it appears implicitly to sanction the tyranny of the majority." Injustices must be accepted if some good is realized for enough people! Relatedly, do we not need a safety net of natural rights against the risk of misrepresentations of the good? Shrader-Frechette further criticizes MacIntyre for inconsistency, because his Thomist tradition does not start with the good and then specify what is just, quoting Aquinas's claim "good men are so-called chiefly from their justice." Having discussed these 4 arguments, Shrader-Frechette offers an overall assessment of how MacIntyre fares with the project of protecting vulnerable people. First, he thinks only moral theology can provide protection, which means he has more or less abandoned philosophy: arguments which do not appeal to shared theology. That is a weaker position than normal from which to defend the vulnerable. A further problem, as he admits, is that his theologically-based ethics, focusing on divine law, will seem oppressive to many people. "Maclntyre's words, which he admits are barriers to liberty and choice, seem to leave room for Muslim fundamentalists to stone to death women who do not wear the veil, and for Christian fundamentalists to kill abortion doctors, both acting in the name of a theologically-grounded concept of the good, and both violating human rights." She says: for MacIntyre, no rational appeal against mistaken theological ethics is possible. She quotes MacIntyre: "The modern state . . . presents itself as the guardian of our values . . . but the shared public goods of the modern nation-state are not the common goods of a genuine nation-wide community, and when the nation-state masquerades as the guardian of such a common good, the outcome is bound to be either ludicrous or disastrous or both." Yet he still supports democracy: why? Shrader-Frechette also quotes MacIntyre against the modern family, which is not embedded within a local community, in which families, workplaces, schools, clinics, debating clubs, sporting clubs, and religious congregations, all have their place. And Shrader-Frechette registers MacIntyre's emphasis on similarities between humans and animals (or non-human animals). Her example of the vulnerable though is generally Afghan widows! In her conclusion, Shrader-Frechette actually adds somethign new to the main body. She engages in a thought-experiment. MacIntyre says that the theological tradition he values exists in a less fragmentary from in certain communities with stronger ties to the past. She invites one to imagine being in a "minority" position within such a community, e.g. the only gay Protestant in a Catholic village! Bill Bowring. 2008. Misunderstanding MacIntyre on Human Rights. Analyse & Kritik 30: 205-214. Available at: https://www.analyse-und-kritik.net/Dateien/56c1c7f540602_ak_bowring_2008.pdf Article whose argument I found difficult to follow. In After Virtue, MacIntyre attacks the idea of rights which belong to humans simply because they are human, whether recognized by a legal system or not, and singles out Gewirth and Ronald Dworkin for attack."MacIntyre points to the fact that prior to the eighteenth century, where such rights were spoken of as 'natural rights' or 'rights of man', there was no expression in any ancient or medieval language correctly translated by the modern expression 'a right'." For MacIntyre, the best explanation for this is that such talk is mere modern rhetoric, rather than identifying something the earlier ages missed. Michael Freeman thinks that MacIntyre's attack on rights overlooks a non-foundationalist conception of rights, but Bowring says that MacIntyre would be against this too. Upendra Baxi characterizes MacIntyre's position as human rights weariness, but Bowring disagrees. Marie-Benedicte Dembour classifies MacIntyre as a human right nihilist, like herself, but Bowring doubts this "recruitment." [Why? It seems right.] MacIntyre is an Aristotelian, who thinks only in a suitable social setting does moral language, and concepts, have a point and is it able to function. His triad of practice-narrative-tradition is presented. For his definition of practice, see elsewhere in this document. He defines tradition as "an historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition". MacIntyre rejects Burke's opposition between reason and tradition, asserting "it is traditions that are the bearers of reason, and traditions at certain periods actually require and need revolutions for their continuance." The French revolution is referred to in this context. Another quote from MacIntyre: "Aristotle's presupposed social context is one in which evaluation is primarily in terms of the achievement of the ends of activity; Hume's is one in which evaluation is primarily in terms of the satisfaction of consumers." Bowring prefers the earlier MacIntyre to the later more religious MacIntyre. MacIntyre is said to prefer a substantive rather than procedural conception of human rights. What does that mean? Griffin clarifies like so: a substantive notion specifies when a proposed human right genuinely exists. Griffin thinks we should start with "human rights as used in our actual social life by politicians, lawyers, social campaigners, as well as theorists of various sorts, and then sees what higher principles one must resort to in order to explain their moral weight." John Tasioulas wants to combine the idea of human rights being possessed by us because we are human, with temporality: they don't exist at all times or places that humans do. Tasioulas criticizes MacIntyre for overlooking this socially embodied account of human rights. Bowring agrees. [This article would sort-of make more sense to me if Bowring accepted the description of MacIntyre as a human rights nihilist - they don't exist - and agreed with Tasioulas that MacIntyre overlooks a socially embodied conception of human rights.] Joas Adiprasetya. 2016. Alasdair MacIntyre and Martha Nussbaum on virtue ethics. Diskursus 15(1): 1-22. Available at: https://journal.driyarkara.ac.id/index.php/diskursus/article/view/18/11 This article does not merely compare and contrast both philosophers but also relates them to the Indonesian context. "While MacIntyre interprets Aristotle from his traditionalist and communitarian perspective, Nussbaum construes the philosopher in a non-relative and essentialist point of view." MacIntyre, in A Short History of Ethics (1966), tries to separate out what in Aristotle is permanently valuable and what is merely tied to his specific cultural millieu. He later regards this approach as mistaken, after reading George H. Mahood’s article on Confucius and Aristotle. Neutrality is impossible. [What is of value now or tomorrow from Aristotle depends on your circumstances?] By After Virtue (1981), MacIntyre has concluded that the history of modern morality can only be adequately written from an Aristotelian perspective, and he thinks to write the history of modern secularization as a Christian theist, leading him to "Thomistic Aristotelianism", i.e. Aquinas, as combining the two strands. Michael Fuller distinguishes four interpretations of this term, of which I present three. " First, there is a maximum interpretation in which MacIntyre accepts everything that Aristotle and Aquinas said as true. The second is a minimum interpretation, according to which MacIntyre only adopts their talk about 'human flourishing' and 'common good.'... Fourth, MacIntyre understands Aquinas as the improver of Aristotle and that Aquinas himself can be improved on." [Second is a problem for Shrader-Frechette, it seems.] Adipasetya agrees with Fuller in favouring the 4th interpretation. MacIntyre is quoted as believing in a choice between Nietzsche and rejecting Enlightenment as a project that should not have been pursued. He is opposed to Nietzsche and followers (Foucault and Deleuze), saying the unmasking Nietzschean genealogists must in the end unmask themselves. Aristotle is regarded as more intelligible and truthful. MacIntyre recognizes that different thinkers have had different lists of virtues, but he must declare a core conception, or he will be Nietzschean, and yet it must not be ahistorical, or he will be pursuing an Enlightenment project. MacIntyre thinks the best solution to this problem comes from the practice-narrative-tradition concepts. His definition of practice is analysed by Adiprsetya like so: "Practices are human activities; 2. Practices have goods that are internal to the activities; 3. Practices have standards of excellencewithout which internal goods cannot be fully achieved; 4. Practices are systematically extended." Internal goods are what practices are directed towards. Those who have no experience of the practice cannot judge its goods. "The goal of practices for MacIntyre is to meet the standards of excellencethat is systematically extended. The historical wholeness of the practicesto attain the goal is to be put into a context, which is simply called narratives." And "Tradition is very important to provide commu-nal continuity to a human pursuit." Martha Nussbaum is introduced as an expert ancient Greek scholar who rejects relativism, referring to MacIntyre as one of the relativists. Nussbaum thinks relativists are wrong to be impressed by the locality of Aristotle's list of virtues. Inspired by Aristotle, Nussbaum identifies a list of capabilities cnetral to any satisfactory human life, such as humour and separateness: being able to take actions in one's own surroundings without interference. "Nussbaum believes that her theory can confront the inequality of women better than any other theory. Since human capabilities are universal, they do not depend on gender difference." Adisprasetya writes: " Nussbaum's attempt to universalize Aristotle's virtues, according to MacIntyre, is similar to the first period of his own career, that is, the period of A Short History of Ethics." Adiprasetya compares incommensurability in MacIntyre - there can be no external assessment of goods - with Nussbaum. He then introduces the Indonesian context. It is in the post-New Order era after the collapse of Soeharto in 1999. There is the possibility of more freedom but "he escalating ethnoreligious conflicts mark the lack of a 'unitive factor' among religious traditions and ethic groups. In addition, many fundamentalists groups, both in Christian and Islam sides, emerge and threaten the unity. The 'majority-minority' language is used widely in everyday conversation as well as in the political competition. The burning of thousands of churches is the clearest sign of what is happening in the country that has the biggest Muslim population in the world... Injustice, corruption, ecological problems, abuses of human rights, children trade are enormously ascending." He thinks virtue ethics is clearly relevant, but which Aristotle? Nussbaum requires a fair and equal society. It would have been useful in 1945 and in similar circumstances in the future. MacIntyre assumes different traditions have equal power: totally untrue in Indonesia. David Herbert proposes turning to Charles Taylor to overcome MacIntyre's gaps. [Taylor is also mentioned in the first Williams review as someone MacIntyre does not attend to. By the way, the surname of this article author reminds me of George Orwell's novel title: Keep the Aspidistra Flying.] Paul Oslington. 2023. Alasdair MacIntyre and Adam Smith on markets, virtues and ends in a capitalist economy. Business Ethics, Environment, and Responsibility 32: 1126-1138. Available at: "Business ethicists inspired by his work have written about the organisation as a moral community, the effect of modern organisations on character, waysof nurturing virtue within organisations and related topics." Oslington quotes MacIntyre on practice as "any coherent and complex form of socially estab￾lished cooperative human activity, through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended." We are told: "The point about practices is that they are the locus of virtues. MacIntyre's first definition of a virtue is ‘an acquired human qual￾ity the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such good' ". "MacIntyre consistently claims that capitalism or market society is not compatible with his Thomistic Aristotelian ethics." "Capitalism and markets undermine the development of virtues and the achievement of internal goods because the activities associated with them are not practices in MacIntyre's sense. The external goods that he acknowledges they generate cannot compensate for the de￾ficiency of internal goods." "For MacIntyre, the requirements of a virtuous life include 'a tempered realism about oneself, one's powers, one's self￾knowledge’, ability to ‘judge which risks it is reasonable to take and which are foolhardy'... contemporary finance fails because it demands of traders' extreme self-confidence, prevents them from properly assessing risks, requires them to ignore the larger human costs of activities and short-termism." "These problems with contemporary finance can be traced back to deeper problems in the way we think about money. Firstly, for MacIntyre, as for Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, money is a means to other goods; however, today, we often now see money as an end in itself. Secondly, the sophisticated financial products that have been devised in recent years allow money to beget money without limit, losing connection to real goods. Thirdly, we increasingly measure human beings by how much money they have." MacIntyre follows Aristotle in favouring the moderate way. "What then is the solution to the problems of capitalism? One so￾lution which MacIntyre advocated in his early work was the over￾throw of the capitalist system, but more recently, it is resistance to capitalism by small participatory communities." "There is a large history and philosophy of economics litera￾ture on whether markets nourish or undermine virtue. This lit￾erature goes back at least as far as Adam Smith, who expressed concerns in the Wealth of Nations about whether the division of labour which he identified as the source of wealth being generated in the emerging commercial order was deforming the character of the population, as well as developing some virtues. Smith pointed to the narrower range of tasks being performed by workers and their repetition as particularly corrosive of character, recom￾mending the expansion of education to ameliorate these effects. Contemporaries such as Montesquieu and David Hume argued for positive effects of commerce on virtue..." (Albert Hirschman says these rival attitudes were pervasive.) Today Deirdre McCloskey argues that capitalism fosters virtues, specifically: "Temperance is 'to save and accumulate', as well as to 'listen to the customer humbly, to resist the temptation to cheat'. Justice is 'to insist on private prop￾erty honestly acquired' also 'to pay willingly for good work, to hon￾our labor, to breakdown privilege, to value people what they can to rather than who they are, to view success without envy'. Courage is to 'venture on new ways of business' and also 'to overcome the fear of change, to be deceived and bankruptcy, to be courteous to new ideas, to wake up next morning and face fresh work with cheer, resisting the despairing pessimism of the clerisy'..." Luigino Bruni and Robert Sugden also present virtues internal to market practice, contrary to MacIntyre: universality, enterprise and alertness, respect for the tastes of one's trading partners, trust and trustworthiness, acceptance of competition, self-help, nonrivalry and stoicism about reward." Article claims MacIntyre is inconsistent with Aristotle. The problem for Aristotle is specifically "when economic life is pursued in a particular way-without recognition of its instrumental character and ignoring limits-that it becomes tainted with this vice", acquisitiveness, whereas MacIntyre thinks mere participation in capitalist economics requires this vice. Oslington says that MacIntyre's reading of Adam Smith as conceiving of humans as simply selfish individuals owes more to popular mythology than Smith's actual textds. Smith is balanced, writing, "How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him". MacIntyre says Smith neglects virtue but Smith identifies 4 major virtues: prudence, justice, beneficience, and self-command. MacIntyre's view that Smith ignores teleology is opposed by historical expert Jacob Viner. (Article notes that business ethicist calls for virtue economics.) "One of the discoveries of recent Smith scholarship has been his indebtedness to Aristotle." This is not elaborated much, but we are told that his 4 virtues necessary to sustain a commercial society.