Scottish-born philosopher whose After Virtue (1981) launched the contemporary revival of Aristotelian virtue ethics and mounted one of the most influential critiques of modern moral philosophy from any quarter. MacIntyre's diagnosis is bleak: contemporary moral discourse is a collection of broken fragments from several incompatible traditions, torn from the social practices that gave them sense, and therefore condemned to interminable, unresolvable disagreement. We argue about abortion, war, and justice as if we were engaged in rational debate, but we are actually clashing shards of different moral worlds.
The constructive move of After Virtue is to recover the Aristotelian framework the Enlightenment rejected: moral virtues are excellences of character developed through participation in socially embedded "practices" (medicine, farming, chess, politics, parenting) whose goods are internal to the activity, not instrumental. A coherent moral life, in turn, requires the narrative unity of a lived life oriented toward a conception of the good, which is itself sustained by a tradition — and traditions are precisely what modernity has shattered.
His later work, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990), developed a sophisticated pluralist account of how rival moral traditions can rationally engage one another without collapsing into relativism. Once a Marxist, MacIntyre became a Thomist Catholic; his quarrel with liberalism is long-running and profound. He is usually grouped with Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor, and Michael Walzer as a "communitarian," though he has resisted the label.