Had you been a Greek or an educated Roman, you would have known the names of certain philosophers. Any Greek would have known of Socrates, Plato or Aristotle, and maybe even have been able to tell you a few of their important ideas.

But if you asked a person on the street today to name a recent philosopher? Good luck. We don’t value serious intellectuals much anymore. Now we have sports stars and movie stars and social media influencers – and maybe a few of the new tech wizards – to inspire us.

Among those on the very short list of contemporary philosophers who reached something like rock-star status (at least among the more serious-minded), was Alasdair MacIntyre. MacIntryre died this last May. What was it that made him so notable?

In a time when the latest philosophy book is expected to bomb every time, MacIntyre’s book “After Virtue,” which came out in 1981, produced an explosion in the field of ethics.

In chapter five of this book, MacIntyre laid down the gauntlet before the philosophical establishment on the issue of ethics. What he basically said was this: The attempt to make rational sense of morality, a project that has gone on for several hundred years now, has been an abject failure.

None of the thinkers involved in the debate – Kierkegaard, Kant, Diderot, Hume – has succeeded in making sense of why we think certain actions are good or bad.

Immanuel Kant said an action is right or wrong depending on whether it follows certain transcendent rules. But why those rules and not some others someone else might think up? There are things that people accept as moral in one era and not in another. How do we judge between them?

The English philosopher David Hume thought morality was based on sentiments. But the sentiments of an 18th-century British aristocrat are a far cry from those of someone living in the 20th century.

John Stuart Mill said that the right action is one that has good consequences, but, as some other philosophers have pointed out, that could justify all kinds of horrific actions.

So, what is morality, and how can it be justified?

To answer this question, MacIntyre pointed to the European Middle Ages, when Christian thinkers resuscitated the Greek philosopher Aristotle. Aristotle believed that different organic things had distinct but inherent purposes embedded in nature by nature. Christians believed this too, but thought it was personally embedded there by God.

In addition to this, Aristotle believed that each organic thing in the world has an inherent nature, or soul, and a thing’s soul points it toward certain things and away from others. This nature or soul is teleological, which just means that it involves a purpose.

Everything is for something.

This is also the case for a human being, except that, although plants and animals always do what their nature dictates, only humans can go against their own nature. Christianity calls this “sin.”

“Within that teleological scheme,” said MacIntyre, “there is a fundamental contrast between man-as-he-happens-to-be and man-as-he-would-be-if-he-realized-his-essential (teleological)-nature.” Ethics, in other words, is getting us from the person we happen to be (a sinful being that defies the image of God in us) to the person we ought to be (the one that conforms to that image). The right action is doing the thing that you were designed to do, the thing which your purposeful inherent nature dictates.

It is the only thing that leads to happiness, another belief about which Aristotle had a lot to say.

Is this view true? Do we all have a metaphysical nature that dictates that we act a certain way and not in another, and which, when we do not abide by it, causes us unhappiness? MacIntyre spent most of the latter part of his life making the case that this is the only view of man and ethics that makes any rational sense.

MacIntyre essentially argued that we, like the medieval thinkers, need to return to Aristotle. Kant, Hume, Kierkegaard, Mill and Nietzsche all had it wrong. To follow these modern philosophers’ views on ethics is to force us into an endless series of intellectual cul-de-sacs.

Maybe, as outdated as many people probably think they are, Aristotle and the medievals were actually right.

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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image Credit: Picryl