Macintyre, Alasdair (1929–)

Alasdair MacIntyre, whose work revived virtue ethics, placing it in the mainstream of contemporary philosophical discussion, was born in Glasgow and received his M.A. from the University of Manchester. He has held a number of university appointments in both the United Kingdom and the United States, including Oxford, Vanderbilt, and Duke, and is currently Senior Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.

MacIntyre's philosophical work encompasses a broad spectrum, but he is primarily known for his work in ethics. He believes that the study of ethics must be interdisciplinary, using the insights of the social sciences, since morality cannot be adequately understood in isolation from particular societies. His most influential work is After Virtue, in which he argues that morality in the modern world consists of a series of fragments from disparate and often contradictory traditions. MacIntyre calls for a return to an earlier understanding of morality based on the virtues. Virtues are stable character traits, such as courage and integrity, that help a person to live a life that promotes human flourishing. People develop virtues in the [Page 1311]context of particular practices. A practice is a cooperative human activity (such as chess, farming, or medicine) through which human beings gain goods internal to the practice. Internal goods, as opposed to external goods such as money or status, can only be gained from participating in a practice, and are discovered by identifying the ends essential to that practice. In medicine, for example, an internal good is helping a sick person in need.

Practices have histories that form various traditions. At the broad level of societal practice, morality makes sense only within a particular tradition with its own view of the proper ends of the good human life. There can be no coherent tradition-independent morality. MacIntyre denies that this leads to relativism. In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? he argues that although there is no tradition-independent rationality, there are criteria through which individuals can compare their own tradition with another to determine which one is superior. MacIntyre believes that the tradition arising from Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas is better than the alternatives, a view he develops in Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry.

MacIntyre's views on business ethics reflect the position that modern corporate culture has helped fragment human life into multiple, often self-contradictory, roles. For example, business managers must necessarily focus on efficiency in running a corporation, but these same managers would not have such a focus in their family lives. An emphasis on efficiency may also conflict with long-term goods for society (e.g., a clean environment).

Despite MacIntyre's skepticism about corporate culture, ethicists such as Robert Solomon who hold a positive view of corporate culture have applied virtue ethics to contemporary business. Solomon understands business to be a practice in the MacIntyrean sense, and discusses the way virtues, such as friendliness, loyalty, and shame, can help stakeholders gain what he terms the goals internal to business.