In 1981, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who has died aged 96, tore up the work he was then writing on ethics, and produced what became his best known book, After Virtue. In it, he excoriated current moral philosophy and, indeed, current morality itself, complaining that morality has been cut off from its roots in tradition, and, “largely thanks to the Enlightenment project”, has ceased to be coherent.
No longer anchored in the Aristotelian notion that humans have a goal and function, or offering an account of how these are to be fulfilled, it divorces values from facts. Although calling a person, practice or action “good” or “bad” seemingly appeals to “an objective and impersonal standard”, said MacIntyre, there is none available. As he had already lamented in Against the Self-Images of the Age (1971), Christianity, Marxism and psychoanalysis have failed to provide an adequate communal ideology.
