Alasdair Macintyre Was Right All Along

“The project of providing a rational vindication of morality had decisively failed,” wrote Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue (1981). Enlightenment philosophers like Immanuel Kant had attempted to justify rationally what was effectively Christian morality. But, despite titanic efforts, they hadn’t succeeded. The result, as MacIntyre described it, was that the morality of Western Enlightenment culture lacked any public, shared rationale or justification. Philosophy, therefore, had lost its central role in culture, becoming a marginal, narrowly academic subject.