Reading Alasdair MacIntyre’s “After Virtue” in Modern New York

“The change with After Virtue, however, is that in an important sense [MacIntyre] turns against modernity as a whole. He argues that the move to modernity involves the destruction of morality—that in modernity we no longer know what we’re talking about when we deploy moral language.”

Dan Addison, a philosophy professor living in New York, joined Merion West editor-in-chief Erich J. Prince to discuss why he decided to teach a course at Hunter College focused on Alasdair MacIntyre’s 1981 book After Virtue. Dr. Addison, who moved to the United States from Australia in 2003, completed his PhD in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh in 2013. His dissertation was on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s critique of Immanuel Kant’s theoretical philosophy. Dr. Addison did not discover MacIntyre’s work until he was teaching philosophy himself after completing his studies. In the time since, Dr. Addison has argued that After Virtue is the essential text for understanding polarization and fragmentation in the modern United States, and this coincides with After Virtue receiving increased attention from a number of thinkers at present, including in the post-liberal movement. In their conversation, Dr. Addison and Mr. Prince discuss the book’s central claims, including emotivism; how his students have reacted to engaging with MacIntyre’s ideas, given that they so often contradict popular messaging today; and the idea of community and incurring obligations.

Dan, can you start by telling me about Alasdair MacIntyre and describing his background?

He’s from Scotland. He published his first book, Marxism, in 1953 and is still alive at the age of 95. He was first drawn to both religion and political Marxism in his youth. I think he considered entering the Presbyterian church when was young, but politics won out, and he was—for decades—a committed Marxist. He moved from Scotland to England, and he came over to America in around 1969. His early works are in academic philosophy but also deeply involved in sociology and history and philosophical history, which of course is very central to everything that happens from After Virtue on.