In his essay, “Thomas Kuhn, Rocks, and the Laws of Physics,” Richard Rorty describes the life–transforming experience of reading the famous historian and philosopher of science. “Kuhn was one of my idols,” he wrote, “because reading his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) had given me the sense of scales falling away from my eyes.” Rorty was not alone. Our academic discourse is now so saturated with the notion of “paradigm change”—the fruit of those who reacted much like Rorty—that it is hard to imagine a pre–Kuhnian age. For many, scales fell not while reading Kuhn, but rather Rorty’s own magisterial Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and now the idea that our beliefs about everything—from science to ethics— are historically contingent is so common that it is hard to imagine anyone’s life being changed because they read this in a book.

I had my own historicist, life–changing experience, but it was not while reading Kuhn, or Rorty, or Foucault. The sense of scales falling away from my eyes occurred, as I lay on my bed, in my John Jay single, reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. MacIntyre, though widely appreciated in the humanities, doesn’t have the name recognition of Rorty or Foucault outside of the academy. This, I think, is too bad, because the philosopher’s work, especially his ultraaccessible After Virtue, offers alternatives to thinkers like Rorty and Rawls which would be well worth pursuing.

The thesis of After Virtue is not complicated, but it is disturbing. It is disturbing because it casts judgment on our society writ large. Our ethical debates—what we do when we shout down the death penalty or lambaste our leaders for increasing taxes—are interminable. There are sound arguments that can be made for opposing sides of almost any issue. Both arguments are sound because they start from different value premises, and we posses no rational mechanism for adjudicating between these conflicting values. Modern society is, MacIntyre argues, emotivist—but not because there is no such thing as right answers in ethics. In a startling coup for any undergraduate who has been charmed into intellectual complacency by A.J. Ayer’s Logic, Truth and Language, MacIntyre turns the emotivist ethics of Ayer’s logical positivism on its head. Ayer’s equation of value judgments with emotions is not so much a theory of ethics as a description of our ethics. Ayer’s conclusion—that the claim “abortion is wrong” is nothing more than a feeble cry of “boo abortion!”—is not a clearing away of centuries of worthless ethical obfuscation, but it is a fairly accurate account of how we argue today.

But only fairly accurate. As MacIntyre is quick to point out, there is a sense in which emotivist accounts are obviously not descriptive: we take it that our moral statements are different—and stronger—than our statements about our emotions. When we say, “The death penalty is unjust,” we think we are doing something different than just expressing our feelings. The emotivist’s insight is about how we have no way of rationally adjudicating between the values that underlie our moral arguments, not about how we conduct our ethical spats. To find a way out of this catastrophic mess, perhaps we can look towards an era in which we could rationally choose between values informing our moral judgments.

This era is the pre–modern period, when virtue–centered ethical theories dominated. MacIntyre dedicates many pages to constructing a stunningly lucid narrative of the rise of modern moral theory. He informs us that ascriptions of “good” were once a three–fold process: there were descriptions of humans as they are, descriptions of humans as they ought to be, and a means of getting from point A to B—the actions we need to take, the virtues we need to cultivate to achieve our ends. This is the final end of humans in Aristotle, a “cause” of virtue, in a sense of the word that we find almost incomprehensible today. For when teleology stopped making sense in science— when the final end of the sun ceased to be one of the causes of its rotation, and we accepted a mechanistic science of efficient causes—teleology disappeared from ethics as well.

So ethical thinkers stopped trying to move from A to B, MacIntyre argues, and started arguing only from A. These philosophers gave us ethical systems that were not intent on showing us how to get from man as he is to man as he ought to be; they gave us systems that are supposedly derived from an account of man as he is Thus, in Kant we find that ethics is based on an account of man as a fundamentally rational being, and—in Mill and the utilitarians— we have an account based on man as a pleasure–maximizer. For MacIntyre, ethical thinkers who stopped thinking about the final end of humanity did not abandon the search for ethical conclusions. In fact, they reached ethical conclusions that made sense within the earlier, teleological system, but they tried to argue for them without recourse to teleology. Such an enterprise was bound to fail from the beginning. It is no wonder, then, MacIntyre thinks, that the twentieth century yielded emotivism. This was the ethical theory that the incoherent Enlightenment project was bound to give us.

This story of modern moral theory swells to fury in the culmination of MacIntyre’s withering critique, a chapter entitled “Aristotle or Nietzsche?” Here is where the scales really fell from my eyes. MacIntyre recounts the discovery of Polynesian taboos by the members of Captain Cook’s voyage. While, from the British standpoint, the natives had surprisingly lax sexual ethics, they had an absolute prohibition against men and women eating together, a prohibition that startled the foreigners. When pressed, the natives could only say that the practice was “taboo“—the word had no further explanation. MacIntyre suggests that the Polynesians could no longer explain taboo because the notion had lost its intelligibility. Taboos had originated in the context of an earlier matrix of social relations, but—with that context removed—taboos took on the character of arbitrary rules that were followed habitually but could not be explained. That the prohibitions no longer made any sense explains the ease with which the emperor Kamehameha II was able to outlaw taboos in Hawaii forty years later. This is, of course, the state of moral arguments in the 20th century. “Good” has been deprived of its meaning because we have forgotten the context in which it was originally employed, and we use it habitually but without real understanding. “Bad,” then, is our version of “taboo.” As the title of MacIntyre’s chapter suggests, there are two options facing us. We can choose Nietzsche, MacIntyre’s Kamehameha II, and get rid of those moral notions that have ceased to be intelligible. On the other hand, we can choose Aristotle and attempt to reconstruct a morality that restores the context in which ascriptions of “good” and “bad” made sense.

MacIntyre chooses the way of Aristotle, and the rest of his book is spent sketching the beginnings of a constructive account of neo–Aristotelian ethics. This is the breaking point in MacIntyre’s work, the boundary between his critique of modern ethical theory and his alternative theory. Up to this point, MacIntyre’s book floored me; I was awed by the fact that one could convincingly sweep away not only the meta–ethical wrangling of the last century, but also the last three centuries of moral thought. As I read, I experienced one of those rare moments when one can suddenly connect all the dots, when everything makes sense, and when a new map of reality is drawn before one’s eyes. My previous ethical intuitions, which wavered somewhere between an obstinate Kantianism and a grudging emotivism, suddenly seemed silly.

Many thinkers have been highly appreciative of MacIntyre’s critique of modern moral theory while remaining unconvinced by the alternative he proposes. Philosophers like Bernard Williams and Richard Rorty agree with MacIntyre’s account of the incoherence of Enlightenment ethics while rejecting his belief in an Aristotelian alternative. And, for those who wished to defend utilitarianism and Kantianism, critiquing MacIntyre’s admittedly cursory history required a long overdue reacquaintance with the history of ethics.

The let–down is this: a convincing defense of Aristotelianism is not presented in After Virtue forward. He attempts to isolate the core that is common to all accounts of virtue. He suggests that virtue is central to a unified human life. He argues that moral reasoning is impossible outside of some tradition of inquiry. Yet these are only skeletal arguments for provocative theses, theses that cannot be defended by MacIntyre’s book alone. Interestingly enough, these theses have been developed in the three subsequent volumes that round out what has been dubbed the “ After Virtue, Project.” I remember rubbing my head as I finished MacIntyre’s book, mildly perplexed and unsure if I was willing to battle my way through another 600 pages just to find out the fate of MacIntyre’s historicism.

This should clue us into some of the paradoxes of MacIntyre. MacIntyre is, for lack of a better term, a hobo philosopher. Reading his work feels like reading a more proper, more well–mannered Foucault—a Foucault who has studied plenty of analytic philosophy. This is because After Virtue is somewhat similar to books like Discipline and Punish; both books seek to locate and make explicit the forces that shape our conceptions of the self. But, if MacIntyre’s work is a toolbox for activists, it is unclear what sort of activists these are supposed to be. He is often pegged as a conservative, and it is true that he detests the liberalism that excludes debate about the good life from the public square. But MacIntyre is also a former Marxist, and his distaste for laissez–faire capitalism is apparent everywhere in After Virtue—from his description of that modern archetype, the bourgeois manager whose only job is maximizing efficiency, to his inclusion of Trotsky and Engels on his list of virtuous people. Perhaps it is not so uncanny that a conference on MacIntyre, Marx, and Aristotle was held last year.

MacIntyre is an historicist in his approach to philosophy, a believer in incommensurable moral traditions and in the importance of tradition for rationality. In this sense, he can be grouped with those English–speaking philosophers who have been appreciative of Continental thought: Rorty, Charles Taylor, Stanley Cavell, and Hubert Dreyfus. But MacIntyre is rarely associated with the aforementioned thinkers. Perhaps this is because he is a self–proclaimed Thomist who has spent less time writing about contemporary philosophy and more time weighing in on debates about the interpretation of Aquinas. (He also seems to have grown increasingly Catholic in his interests: he recently published a book on the thought of Edith Stein, the Jewish convert to Catholicism who became a discalced Carmelite nun and was killed at Auschwitz). Nonetheless, MacIntyre is not exactly at home among natural law theorists and Aquinas scholars, either. The future will tell us, as it almost always does, whether the wandering caravan of MacIntyre’s historicism will ever find a home.

ANDREW FLINN is a senior philosophy and history major in Columbia College and former Literary Editor of The Current. He reviewed Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West in the Winter 2007 issue.