Why the Enlightenment Had to Fail

Thaddeus J. Kozinski, Ph.D.

Near the beginning of After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre summarizes the beliefs of liberalism in the form of a
challenge:

Contemporary moral argument is rationally interminable, because all moral, indeed, all evaluative, argument is and
always must be rationally interminable. Contemporary moral disagreements of a certain kind cannot be resolved,
because no moral disagreements of that kind in any age, past, present, or future, can be resolved. What you present
as a contingent feature of our culture, standing in need of some special, perhaps historical explanation, is a necessary
feature of all cultures which possess evaluative discourse. This is a challenge which cannot be avoided at an early
stage in this argument. Can it be defeated?i

Such is MacIntyre’s account of liberalism’s account of the fact of reasonable pluralism. According to the latter, when
evaluative discourse, or in Rawls’s words, “free use of human reason,” is permitted to operate in society, a pluralism
of comprehensive moral doctrines is the inevitable result. Any absence of such pluralism in society, then, indicates
the suppression of the free use of reason and evaluative discourse; for, absent anti-pluralistic coercive force, pluralism
will inevitably be socially present. For MacIntyre, however, this interpretation is not just debatable, but manifestly
false, as it is based upon a false theory. The lack of moral consensus is inevitable, but only in liberal cultures; for,
liberalism involves particular beliefs and practices that function to preclude moral consensus. Ironically, the moral
theory upon which these consensus-preventing beliefs and practices are based is itself explicitly aimed at securing
moral consensus. In fact, its boast is to be able to produce a moral consensus more secure, true, and worthy of the
dignity of human beings than what ancient paganism or medieval Christendom ever produced or could have ever
produced.
In After Virtue MacIntyre associates this theory with the Enlightenment, and in Three Rival Versions or Moral
Inquiry he names it Encyclopaedia. Here is MacIntyre’s summary of Enlightenment moral theory, and the cause of its
inevitable failure:

Thus, all of these writers share in the project of constructing valid arguments which will move from premises
concerning human nature as they understand it to be to conclusions about the authority of moral rules and precepts.
I want to argue that any project of this form was bound to fail, because of an ineradicable discrepancy between their
shared moral conception of moral rules and precepts on the one hand and what was shared—despite much larger
divergences—in their conception of human nature on the other.ii

For MacIntyre discrepancy must result in any attempt to derive moral rules and precepts from a conception of human
nature absent a definite human telos. MacIntyre asks what the relationship between “untutored human nature” and
moral precepts could be in the absence of a conception of “man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-telos.” His answer
is that there can be no rational, coherent relationship, since the moral precepts that Enlightenment thinkers employ in
their theories were initially understood and developed to function as bridges from untutored to telos-realized man.
Existing now as “a set of moral injunctions deprived of their teleological context,” iii however, there can be no coherent
justification for obeying them, and we are left with an unanswerable “no ought from is” argument: “Once the notion
of essential human purposes or functions disappears from morality, it begins to appear implausible to treat moral
judgments as factual statements.”iv
The rejection of a teleological concept of human is tantamount, in MacIntyre’s eyes, to a rejection of the entire
Aristotelian philosophical tradition, for the teleological conception that the Enlightenment thinkers rejected was part
of a wholesale rejection of their inheritance from the medieval Aristotelian tradition. Once the Aristotelian structure
of teleological ethics was abandoned, the conception of a universal human nature, as well as a “good-knowing”
practical reason, remained, but it was now deprived of a sense of normative telos, being interpreted as arbitrary human
desire and will, and autonomous practical rationality respectively. Utilitarianism and Kantianism divided up the new
moral universe, as it were, but neither of these could survive rational scrutiny for long. For, they and all their various
theoretical iterations are based upon a conception of the human being as an autonomous moral agent, and whether one
conceives of this agent in terms of utilitarian desire or Kantian rationality, the “oughtness” of moral injunction and
the rationality of moral judgment possess no force and coherency after being uprooted from a teleological and
normative account of human nature. However, the lack of a coherent and noncontroversial ground for moral precepts

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did not lead, at first, to the rejection of these moral precepts, but to four hundred years or so of sophisticated and
creative attempts to ground these precepts. This, essentially, is the Enlightenment project, a project, MacIntyre insists,
that failed and was bound to fail: “We still, in spite of the efforts of three centuries of moral philosophy and one of
sociology, lack any coherent rationally defensible statement of a liberal individualist point of view.” v
If modern morality is truly foundationless, notwithstanding the elaborate, theoretical architectural efforts of
thinkers such as Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Kant, then what all moral injunctions and evaluations amount to, as long
as teleological human nature and practical reason are rejected, are “the preferences of arbitrary will and desire.” vi This,
the essential claim of Friedrich Nietzsche, is, for MacIntyre, an accurate description of the core of Enlightenment
theory and Enlightenment culture lying underneath the masks of “rationality,” “universality,” and “objectivity.” These
masks lose their cloaking ability once the logic of the initial rejection of a universal human telos is perceived:
“Whenever those immersed in the bureaucratic culture of the age try to think their way through to the moral
foundations of what they are and what they do, they will discover suppressed Nietzschean premises.” vii For MacIntyre,
Nietzsche’s critique is unanswerable as long as one accepts the fundamental premise of the Enlightenment project, the
rejection of Aristotelian teleology. But, as MacIntyre claims, “If Aristotle’s position in ethics and politics—or
something very like it—could be sustained, the whole Nietzschean enterprise would be pointless.” viii MacIntyre’s
entire project can be summed up as the attempt to demonstrate the truth of this hypothesis.

MacIntyre’s Tradition Constituted Rationality

In explaining MacIntyre’s rejection of modern liberal culture, belief, and theory, we have described liberal culture’s
dysfunction, liberal belief’s incoherency, and liberal theory’s groundlessness. But there is an even more fundamental
reason for MacIntyre’s negative assessment of modernity’s theoretical and practical aspects, the treatment of which
requires us first to understand what he considers the positive theoretical and practical alternative. The Enlightenment
project had to fail because it rejected Aristotle’s teleological account of reason and human nature. However, the
Enlightenment thinkers’ rejection of their Aristotelian philosophical inheritance as transmitted through their
immediate predecessors, the medieval and late-Renaissance schoolmen and humanists, was, for MacIntyre, only one
aspect of their more comprehensive rejection of the idea and existence of a philosophical inheritance itself. In other
words, what Enlightenment thinkers rejected was their dependence upon a history of rational activity of which they
were ineluctable participants. In a word, the Enlightenment rejected the intrinsic relationship of rationality to tradition:
“What the Enlightenment made us for the most part blind to and what we now need to recover is, so I shall argue, a
conception of rational enquiry as embodied in a tradition.” ix The Enlightenment’s rejection of Aristotle was wrong
since human nature is indeed teleological, but it was doubly wrong because Aristotle’s project, like it or not, was also
their project, insofar as it was part of their inheritance, like it or not. The Enlightenment did not simply reject the
specific philosophical content of Aristotelianism, for by rejecting the very idea of an intellectual tradition (an idea not
presupposed by the specific Aristotelian philosophical content it rejected, as MacIntyre points out),x it lost the intrinsic
and ineluctable form of any successful project of rational inquiry. The Enlightenment rejection of the Aristotelian
tradition was, then, a more profound error than simply a rejection of Aristotle’s teleological conception of human
nature; it was the rejection of the sine qua non of all rational activity.

An Aristotelian Theory of Practice

The Enlightenment, by rejecting its dependence on tradition, rejected to a certain extent rational enquiry itself,
and so fell into incoherency. Thus, MacIntyre’s alternative to the Enlightenment project is more than just a defense of
Aristotle’s teleological ethics. While defending the Aristotelian tradition of moral enquiry in particular, MacIntyre
mounts a defense of tradition in general by demonstrating the dependence of rational enquiry itself, whatever the
mode, on tradition. The dysfunction of liberal culture and groundlessness of liberal theory is ultimately the result of
the anti-traditional stance of its theory: “There is no standing ground, no place for enquiry, no way to engage in the
practices of advancing, evaluating, accepting, and rejecting reasoned argument apart from that which is provided by
some particular tradition or other.”xi Nietzsche recognized the connection of tradition to moral thought, for he rejected
the claim of the Enlightenment thinkers to have provided a tradition independent, a-cultural, a-historical,
universalistic, that is, purely “rational” foundation for moral discourse and judgment. Yet, Nietzsche mistakenly
conflated the traditional, the cultural, and the historical with the irrational, and thereby denied the possibility of any
reasonable moral discourse and judgment whatsoever. For MacIntyre, however, there is a third option between
Enlightenment foundationalism and genealogical (MacIntyre’s term for the Nietzschean tradition) perspectivism.

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 MacIntyre recognizes that Aristotle’s understanding of the relation of the tradition in which he was working to
theory, as well as the relation of tradition to theory in general, leaves much to be desired. Indeed, the idea of a
substantial and intrinsic relation of tradition to rationality is antithetical to Aristotle’s understanding of his own project
of enquiry, as MacIntyre notes here:

To treat Aristotle as part of a tradition, even as its greatest representative, is a very unAristotelian thing to do. . . .
Thus, the notion of a tradition embodies a very unAristotelian theory of knowledge according to which each
particular theory or set of moral or scientific beliefs is intelligible and justifiable—insofar as it is justifiable—only
as a member of an historical series.xii

Yet, though Aristotle did not and perhaps, due to the limits of ancient philosophical consciousness, could not have
recognized the tradition-dependent nature of enquiry, MacIntyre certainly does, and After Virtue serves as the
introductory work of MacIntyre’s narrative history of the tradition of which Aristotle is the inaugural figure, Augustine
the Christian Platonist, dialectical challenge, and Aquinas the tradition’s great synthesizer whose thought is its
culminating, dialectical synthesis.
In After Virtue, MacIntyre is less concerned with showing how rational enquiry relates to tradition in general,
than with showing why the Aristotelian tradition in particular is indispensable for an accurate diagnosis of the moral
disease of modernity and an effective prescription for its cure. This prescription, a third way between Enlightenment
and Genealogy, is not fully developed in After Virtue, but its foundation is present in what MacIntyre sees as Aristotle’s
avoidance of both abstract universalism and relativistic particularism in the starting point for ethical enquiry: “Aristotle
thus sets himself the task of giving an account of the good which is at once local and particular—located in and
partially defined by the characteristics of the polis—and yet also cosmic and universal.”xiii According to MacIntyre’s
analysis, Aristotle’s simultaneously local and universal account of the good involves four main ideas: human telos,
practices, virtues, and narrative. The universal human telos, the rejection of which defines the Enlightenment project,
is that final goal toward which humans by nature move, what Aristotle calls eudaimonia, and what we call happiness,
though it is more a state of soul and activity, rather than a feeling or passive experience. The virtues “are precisely
those qualities the possession of which will enable an individual to achieve eudaimonia and the lack of which will
frustrate his movement toward that telos.”xiv These two definitions are relatively non-controversial, at least by pre-
modern standards, for they are formalistic and abstract. However, as soon as we attempt to give a specific content to
these formal definitions in the form of a list of virtues, we run into difficulties. For, the Homeric, Sophoclean,
Aristotelian, and Thomistic lists, rankings, and overall conception of the virtues are significantly different from one
another, even irreconcilable.
Virtue, however, is not an amorphous concept; it does have definitive content, but absent certain other conceptual
components, it is impossible to define this particular content intelligibly. MacIntyre outlines the indispensable
conceptual components of virtue in terms of stages: “The first stage requires a background account of what I shall call
a practice, the second an account of . . . the narrative order of a single human life and the third account . . . a moral
tradition.”xv MacIntyre defines a practice as follows:

By a practice I am going to mean any coherent and complex form of socially established co-operative human activity
through which goods internal to that form of activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those standards
of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human
powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically
extended.xvi

MacIntyre gives a revised definition of virtue in terms of his understanding of practice: “A virtue is an acquired human
quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices
and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods.”xvii
For MacIntyre, man can neither know nor possess the good qua individual, but must submit his individual mind
and will to the communal standards and judgments of a practice, the participation in which both requires and develops
the virtues, which empower those actions by which goods may be possessed. By participating in practices, one is
enabled to achieve both “internal” and “external” goods. Internal goods are goods of excellence, inherent to practices,
and good in themselves; they require moral virtue for their attainment. External goods, goods of effectiveness, such as
money, power, and status, are external to practices and are only instrumentally good; they are obtainable without
having moral virtue. Both the intelligibility of and desire for the goods of excellence are made available to the
participant only from within a practice, while the goods of effectiveness are intrinsically unrelated to practices though
intrinsic to institutions; the latter are indispensable to the existence and survival of practices, but are always in
competition with and a threat to their integrity and flourishing. xviii Virtues are both the means to and ends of practices,

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for they enable one to understand and possess the goods that one’s participation in the practice teaches one to desire,
and they are themselves constituent goods of the practice acquired by participation in it.
However, just as individual actions can only be judged virtuous or vicious according to the moral criteria intrinsic
to practices, actions, and the practices in which they occur, can only be made intelligible as part of a narrative: “I can
only answer the question ‘What am I to do’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what stories do I find myself a
part?’”xix At the first stage, a narrative encompasses one’s entire life, and though the particular story is as unpredictable
as the living actions that constitute its plot, as it were, one’s life narrative is, nevertheless, teleological: “There are
constraints on how the story can continue.”xx MacIntyre calls the unity of the narrative of one’s entire life “the unity
of a narrative quest.”xxi Life narratives are themselves components of a more comprehensive narrative, an inherited
moral tradition, in which, pace the Enlightenment, everyone is ineluctability and intimately involved: “What I am,
therefore, is in key part what I inherit, a specific past that is present to some degree in my present. I find myself part
of a history and that is generally to say, whether I like it or not, whether I recognize it or not, one of the bearers of
tradition.”xxii Just as individual participants in practices have historical life narratives that characterize their identities,
practices have life histories, and these are embedded in the grand narrative of a tradition, including the culture in
which it developed. To recognize the goods internal to a practice, we must participate in that practice, and to
understand the practice itself, we must participate in the tradition that transmits and shapes that practice.xxiii

[I]f the account of the virtues which I have defended can be sustained, it is the isolation and self-absorption of ‘the
great-man’ which thrust upon him the burden of being his own self-sufficient moral authority. For if the conception
of a good has to be expounded in terms of such actions as those of a practice, of the narrative unity of a human life
and of a moral tradition, then the goods, and with them the only grounds for the authority of laws and virtues, can
only be discovered by entering into those relationships which constitute communities whose central bond is a shared
vision of and understanding of goods.xxiv

According to liberalism, there can be no communities based upon shared vision and understanding of goods, if
by good one means something antecedent and transcendent to man’s desires; there are only affinity-based groupings
of autonomously chosen preferences. Moreover, the liberal would insist that authentic and vibrant communities can
and do exist within liberal culture, that is, that culture purified of any overarching Aristotelian theoretical basis or
practical framework. This is not an insistence After Virtue adequately challenges, as MacIntyre recognizes, for the
long-term task MacIntyre has set for himself, to vindicate the Aristotelian tradition against all rivals, was not quite
complete in After Virtue.

Rationality as Tradition, Tradition as Rationality

At the beginning of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, MacIntyre writes,

These conclusions required support from an account of what rationality is, in the light of which rival and
incompatible evaluations of the arguments of After Virtue could be adequately accounted for. I promised a book in
which I should attempt to say both what makes it rational to act in one way rather than another and what makes it
rational to advance and defend one conception of practical rationality rather than another. xxv

MacIntyre’s defense of the superior rationality of the Aristotelian tradition of moral theory and practice relative to the
liberal tradition was not yet adequate because it required a generic defense of tradition-based rationality as such. In
After Virtue, MacIntyre only laid the foundation for this more comprehensive defense that would both reveal the
indispensability of tradition to rationality in general (Whose Justice? Which Rationality?), and vindicate the particular,
substantive content of the Aristotelian tradition over every rival, a tradition now authoritatively interpreted and
developed in the light of Christian revelation by Thomas Aquinas (Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry).
As in After Virtue (AV), MacIntyre begins Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (WJ) with a characterization of
liberal culture as not just morally pluralistic but morally confused, but instead of asking how it would be possible to
attain moral consensus in such a culture, he asks quite a different question:

For what many of us are educated into is, not a coherent way of thinking and judging, but one constructed out of an
amalgam of social and cultural fragments inherited both from different traditions from which our culture was
originally derived (Puritan, Catholic, Jewish) and from different stages in and aspects of the development of
modernity (the French Enlightenment, the Scottish Enlightenment, nineteenth-century economic liberalism,
twentieth-century political liberalism). So often enough in the disagreements which emerge within ourselves, as
well as in those which are matters of conflict between ourselves and others, we are forced to confront the question:

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 How ought we to decide among the claims of rival and incompatible accounts of justice competing for our moral,
social, and political allegiance?xxvi

The Enlightenment’s answer was to use reason alone to discover the most rational account of justice, by “appeal to
principles undeniable by any rational person.” xxvii However, no such principles have ever emerged, as evidenced by
the history, which MacIntyre recounts with great detail, of the unceasing rivalry amongst Enlightenment thinkers
regarding these principles. What MacIntyre aims to show in WJ is that the nature of practical rationality itself is the
decisive issue in resolving any dispute about the nature of justice. The reason the Enlightenment thinkers could not
come to any agreement on the precise nature of justice is that their agreement on a particular conception of practical
rationality, a defective one, necessarily precluded such an agreement:

What the Enlightenment made us for the most part blind to and what we now need to recover is a conception of
rational enquiry as embodied in a tradition, a conception according to which the standards of rational justification
themselves emerge from and are part of a history in which they are vindicated by the way in which they transcend
the limitations of and provide remedies for the defects of their predecessors within the history of that same
tradition.xxviii

In WJ, MacIntyre takes his explanation of “why the Enlightenment had to fail” to a higher level, arguing that it
was not simply its rejection of the Aristotelian tradition but tradition-as-such that lead to its intellectual incoherence
and practical failure. The upshot of MacIntyre’s three-hundred-plus page narrative of the three main conceptions of
practical rationality, ancient and classical Greek Aristotelianism, medieval European Thomistic Augustinianism, and
eighteenth-century Scottish and English Enlightenment is the following: “No uncontested and incontestable account
of what tradition-independent morality consists in and consequently no neutral set of criteria by means of which the
claims of rival and contending traditions can be adjudicated.”xxix This verdict could lead one to a genealogical
explanation for the absence of any incontestable morality as rooted in the non-existence of “morality” itself, with the
latter, along with “reason,” being only illusory terms for what in reality is only the a-rational and amoral will-to-power
of individuals. However, for MacIntyre, the true explanation is not that morality and reason mask something inherently
non-moral and unreasonable, but that the notion of a tradition-independent morality and rationality constitutes such a
mask.
Thus, the first step for a solution to the root problem of liberal culture and theory, the lack of a coherent conception
of an overarching and universal human good and a rational justification for moral prescriptions, requires the
understanding that all moral enquiry, indeed, all rational enquiry, is inherently tradition-guided and tradition-bound.
In AV, MacIntyre describes the function of tradition as that “which provide both practices and individual lives with
their necessarily historical context.”xxx Just as an individual life becomes intelligible only in the context of an historical
life narrative, so a communal life, as well as the communal practices that constitute it, is made intelligible only through
a historical, communal narrative, and tradition is just this communal narrative. Surprisingly, MacIntyre does not
provide us with a sufficiently comprehensive and clear definition of tradition in WJ,xxxi although he does provide a
helpful description in AV:

A living tradition, then, is a historically extended, socially embodied argument, precisely in part about the goods
which constitute that tradition. . . Once again the narrative phenomenon of embedding is crucial: the history of a
practice in our time is generally and characteristically embedded in and made intelligible in terms of the larger and
longer history of that tradition through which the practice in its present form was conveyed to us; the history of each
of our own lives generally and characteristically is embedded in and made intelligible in terms of the larger and
longer histories of a number of traditions.xxxii

Tradition, for MacIntyre, is the concrete, contingent, particular, and historically embodied realities of our daily
lives, unified together in a coherent system of thought and practice. It is any set of practices, customs, rituals, texts,
arguments, authorities, institutions, artifacts (and any historically extended and socially embodied phenomena) unified
by a distinct narrative serving to interpret and order these phenomena, and affording the participant particular habits
of knowing, judging, and feeling, and thus, intellectual access to an overarching comprehension of the world, the
good, and his proper place in these. MacIntyre insists that it is only through active participation in particular authentic
traditions that men are rendered capable of discovering and achieving their ultimate good; for, it is only through a
particular tradition that we can properly apprehend universal truth. Indeed, without tradition we are unable to make
much sense of reality at all because our bodies, minds, and souls are, in a certain sense, products of tradition
themselves. Men are body and soul composites, and so, pace Descartes, any intellectual encounter with reality is
necessarily mediated by our bodies, which are, along with our souls that provide their form, themselves inextricably
embedded in a particular culture with a particular history. Moreover, the language and concepts we use to interpret

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and make sense of the brute facts of reality originate and develop in traditions. In short, all men are necessarily
habituated into one or more particular traditions, even if these be incoherent and considerably defective traditions,
such as liberalism. Absent the resources of one tradition or another, coherent knowledge and discovery of the good is
simply impossible for human beings. We are, in MacIntyre’s improvement on Aristotle’s classic definition, “tradition-
dependent rational animals.”
Since a tradition is culturally particularistic and historically contingent, the arguments within it are, in some sense,
relativized and thus inherently vulnerable to rational comparison, evaluation, and critique. Thus, once liberalism is
situated and understood within the conceptual and historical framework of a tradition, it loses its privileged status as
the unique possessor of “the facts” about man and society; it no longer can claim a priori to transcend the “irrational”
particularities of history, culture, and religion. Liberalism conceived as a tradition can no longer claim to be above the
fray, since it is now, prima facie, equal to any other tradition qua tradition. It may turn out to be rationally superior to
its competitors, but it can no longer claim this superiority without a fight, as it were. Thus, MacIntyre’s theory of
tradition-constituted rationality forces liberalism into the ring as a contender in a fair fight.

Between Foundationalism and Relativism

If the portrayal of systems of rational enquiry as historical traditions renders them contestable and vulnerable to
rational critique through the relativization of their truth claims, then the philosophical issue of the availability of
rational criteria for intra-and inter-traditional comparison and critique becomes important. Do such criteria exist, and
if so, are they also tradition-bound and relativized? If so, then how would rational evaluation and critique proceed?
How could one possibly evaluate the truth claims within and among different traditions of enquiry if the criteria for
evaluation are themselves tradition-relative? On the other hand, if we aspire to tradition-independent evaluative
criteria, then do we not put ourselves back under the Enlightenment illusion of a neutral and tradition-transcending
“reason”? If we repudiate a universally accessible rationality transcending traditions, is this not tantamount to a
repudiation of universal rationality itself? Are we then left with only parochial, particularist, historically and culturally
conditioned traditions among which no definitive and accurate comparative evaluation can be made, and within which
access to universal truth is simply not attainable?
MacIntyre addresses and attempts to resolve these questions in his analysis of the “relativist” and “perspectivist”
positions. Once we abandon the possibility of a universal mode of rational discourse accessible and intelligible to
anyone regardless of the particular background beliefs of his tradition, it does become difficult to see how we can
escape from either relativism, which MacIntyre defines as the “denial that rational debate between and rational choice
among rival traditions is possible,” or perspectivism, the impossibility of “making truth claims from within any one
tradition.” Macintyre depicts these positions as the “negative counterpart of the Enlightenment, its inverted mirror
image.”xxxiii Both positions have in common the rejection of the rationality of traditions: for the Enlightenment thinker,
irrational tradition is that from which one must escape to attain universal rationality, while for the post-Enlightenment
perspectivist and relativist, tradition is both irrational and inescapable. What both positions miss, according to
MacIntyre, is the possibility of an account of tradition as neither irrational nor escapable, and an account of rationality
as both tradition-bound and tradition-transcendent. What it meant by “inescapable” is not the impossibility of moving
from one tradition to another, only the impossibility of moving from one particular tradition to no particular tradition,
or from no particular tradition to one particular tradition. There is no such thing as thinking within “no tradition.”
Even liberalism, which defines itself by eschewing tradition altogether, is a still a tradition, albeit a particularly weak
one due to its thinness, heterogeneity, and incoherency. One who attempts to defend liberalism as tradition-
independent will ineluctably depend upon particular intellectual assumptions and background beliefs about reality,
and standards for evaluating arguments, and he must inevitably employ a specific interpretation of the meaning of
truth as well as a particular linguistic and conceptual scheme. All these epistemological and ontological components
derive from a tradition of enquiry, for without these components, rationality is impossible. Thus, the denial of one’s
dependence upon tradition is delusional, for affirmation and denial are themselves rational activities that presuppose
a particular rational framework that only a tradition of rationality can supply: “To be outside all traditions is to be a
stranger to enquiry; it is to be in a state of intellectual and moral destitution, a condition from which it is impossible
to issue the relativist challenge.”xxxiv
MacIntyre differentiates his viewpoint from the idealist foundationalism of Descartes and the historicist
absolutism of Hegel. Pace Descartes, the foundation of any rational system of enquiry are contingent and positivist
beliefs since rational analysis and critique can only take place from within the structure of rationality that one has
inherited:

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 The rationality of a tradition-constituted and tradition-constitutive enquiry is in key and essential part a matter of
the kind of progress which it makes through a number of well-defined types of stage. Every such form of enquiry
begins in and from some condition of pure historical contingency, from the beliefs, institutions and practices of
some particular community which constitute a given.xxxv

Even if first principles are experienced as being discovered for oneself, discovery cannot occur outside a historical
and dialectical process, “Such first principles are not self-sufficient epistemological first principles.”xxxvi Tradition-
constituted rationality is not perspectivist, however, for it accepts the existence, if not the human attainability, of a
final, exhaustive, definitive truth: “Implicit in the rationality of such enquiry there is indeed a conception of final truth,
that is to say, a relationship of the mind to its objects which would be wholly adequate in respect of the capacity of
that mind.”xxxvii However, pace Hegel, absolute knowledge of this final truth is not attainable, for dialectical
justification is a process without end. xxxviii
Yet, for all the particularity, contingency, and historicity of traditions, they are capable of being transcended.
Micah Lott depicts MacIntyre’s theory as being both tradition-dependent and tradition-transcendent: “A theory might
be rationally justified only given certain assumptions and standards of reason particular to a certain tradition, yet that
theory might be a theory about how things are for all people, regardless of their tradition.”xxxix In other words, although
rooted in a historically conditioned and dialectical justificatory process, MacIntyre’s theory of tradition-constituted
rationality affirms the existence and attainability, at least asymptotically, of universal and objective truth, while
recognizing that assertions of truth are always made within and are a constituent part of the historical development of
a particular tradition. If a tradition develops from unquestioning adherence to its multiform authorities, to an
identification of the inadequacies and incoherencies of these authorities, to a re-articulation of basic beliefs that
resolves and overcomes prior inadequacies and limitations; it can then contrast the newly formulated beliefs with the
old ones. It is in this process of identification, re-articulation, and contrast that truth emerges, truth that is recognized
in the more accurate correspondence of the new, more developed, and purified beliefs with reality. Although truth can
be justifiably asserted at this point, the possibility of more adequately formulated beliefs is never ruled out: “At every
stage beliefs and judgments will be justified by reference to the beliefs and judgments of a previous stage, and insofar
as a tradition has constituted itself as a successful form of enquiry, the claims to truth made within that tradition will
always be less vulnerable to dialectical questioning and objection than were their predecessors.” xl
But what if one were to discover that the incoherencies, inadequacies, and limitations of one’s tradition have not
been resolved by reformulating its beliefs, or that a reformulation is not possible without causing an irreparable rupture
in the tradition? When those working from within a particular tradition recognize that they have ceased making
progress, that internal conflicts can no longer be resolved, that there are unexplainable incoherencies and inadequacies,
and that there are no available resources from within the tradition to solve these problems, the tradition has encountered
what MacIntyre calls an epistemological crisis. Progress and development may resume, but only if a radically “new
and conceptually enriched scheme” is developed that can solve the problems, explain why the tradition has suffered
these problems, and all of this without necessarily causing a fundamental break in the tradition. If a tradition can
resolve its crisis, it can emerge with both a stronger claim to truth, and a fuller understanding of the justification for
this claim that is “more and other to claims of warranted assertibility.” If a tradition does not resolve its crisis, then its
adherents are justified in claiming some or all of its traditional beliefs to be false. At this point, conversion from one
tradition to another tradition that provides “a cogent and illuminating, that is, by their own standards—of why their
own intellectual tradition had been unable to solve its problems or restore its coherence” becomes possible and
rationally compelling.xli
MacIntyre’s explanation of both the attainability of truth from within a particular tradition, and the capacity for
rationally evaluating traditions in terms of tradition-transcending truth presents a formidable challenge to
perspectivism and relativism, on the one hand, and Enlightenment foundationalism, on the other. More importantly,
not only is it a challenge to these theories, it is also a challenge to a radically defective modern culture whose anti-
traditionalist foundations schizophrenically support both these theories. Although modern culture boasts of its
neutrality towards any substantive belief system, permitting robust debate among substantive belief systems, its theater
for debate presupposes precisely that belief-system most incompatible with tradition-constituted rationality:

Where the standpoint of a tradition cannot be presented except in a way which takes account of the history and the
historical situatedness, both of traditions themselves and of those individuals who engage in dialogue with them, the
standpoint of the forums of modern liberal culture presupposes the irrelevance of one’s history to one’s status as a
participant in debate. We confront one another in such forums abstracted from and deprived of the particularities of
our histories.xlii

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 Thomistic-Constituted Rationality
In AV, MacIntyre characterizes and defends Aristotelianism as the only coherent account of ethical thought and
practice due to its cognizance of the nature of and intrinsic relationship between practices, virtues, goods, and the
human telos. Even if Aristotle did not have MacIntyre’s profound grasp of the nature of intellectual tradition, these
four elements render Aristotle’s moral theory especially amenable to MacIntyre’s understanding of moral rationality
as socially embodied. In WJ, MacIntyre gives a detailed narrative of the historical development of the tradition of
Aristotelianism, as well three other distinct traditions. He also provides a systematic account of tradition-based
rationality that maintains the attainability of objective, universal truth within a tradition, as well as the capacity
rationally to evaluate from within a particular tradition the relative superiority or inferiority of other traditions to one’s
own. Finally, he suggests in WJ, but does not provide a systematic demonstration of, the superiority of Thomistic
Aristotelianism. In the last book of his trilogy, Three Rival Forms of Moral Enquiry (TRV), MacIntyre deepens and
extends all of these conclusions by explicitly rooting them in the superior tradition of Thomism, while providing a
persuasive defense of its superiority. In TRV, MacIntyre puts into practice about what in WJ he only theorized by
systematically performing a dialectical and narrative competition of traditions. Although MacIntyre in his previous
works conducts narrative comparisons between the major philosophical traditions and advocates Aristotelian
Thomism—since, for MacIntyre, to narrate is to advocate: “To justify is to narrate how the argument has gone so
far”xliii—the distinctiveness of TRV is the depth, extent, and effectiveness of its “out-narrating,” task, and the straight-
forwardness with which it attempts to vindicate the Thomist tradition over all past, present, and future rivals.
MacIntyre summarizes in a remarkably rich sentence TRV’s main argument:

The conception of truth embodied in the scheme requires that claims for truth on its behalf and on behalf of the
judgments in which it is expressed commit those making them to hold that when that scheme encounters alternative
standpoints making alternative and incompatible, even incommensurable, claims, Aquinas’s dialectical synthesis
will be able to render those standpoints intelligible in a way that cannot be achieved by their own adherents from
their own point of view and to distinguish their defects and limitations from their insights and merits in such a way
as to explain the occurrence of what they themselves would have to take to be their defects and limitations at points
at which their own explanatory capacities are resourceless.xliv

Out of the three main contenders, encyclopaedia (Enlightenment liberalism), genealogy (Nietzscheanism), and
Thomism (the synthesis of Aristotle and Augustine), only the tradition of Thomism can both fully embody and
adequately justify tradition-based enquiry, which is the only kind of genuinely rational enquiry. And since only
tradition-based enquiry can escape internal self-contradiction and incoherence, the only rationally justifiable tradition
of enquiry is Thomism. Neither genealogy nor encyclopaedia can provide a coherent and justifiable narrative of its
own history and development because neither tradition accepts what is indispensable for such a narration, namely, the
fact that theoretical enquiry is inextricably embedded in and made possible by tradition. For the encyclopaedist, this
lack of awareness takes the form of a denial that theory presupposes or depends upon any contingent or historical, pre
or non-theoretical commitments. For the genealogist, it is a denial of anything but the contingent, the historical, and
the pre or non-theoretical:

So, from the standpoint of the Encyclopaedist no tradition is rational qua tradition; a tradition is and can be in respect
of rationality no more than a milieu in which methods and principles are formulated, for it is only methods and
principles to which rational appeal can be made. So also from the standpoint of the genealogist no tradition can be
rational, but in this case for reasons which equally undermine any claim that particular methods or principles are
ever as such rational.xlv

The contemporary proponents of the tradition of encyclopaedia no longer accept the “strong conception of
rationality” held by the proponents of the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopaedia and their predecessors, a conception that
aimed at a conclusive outcome to any debate when properly framed; instead, modern encyclopaedists are resigned to
the inexorable inconclusiveness of moral argument. Nevertheless, the similarity between today’s and yesterday’s
encyclopaedists is sufficient to place them within the same tradition. The similarity is their shared understanding of
morality in general despite radically disparate understanding of the particular moral content: morality is “a distinct
and largely autonomous category of thought and practice.” xlvi They share also in their failure to provide a universal
and timeless account of the content of this morality, and a coherent justification for the force of its practical “ought.”
For MacIntyre, there is a manifest absence of consensus among contemporary encyclopaedists regarding indisputable

8
particular content for a universally intelligible and applicable morality, and thus they have no answer to the
genealogists’ claim that no such consensus is possible because objective, universal morality itself does not exist—
there is really no “ought.”
Why must the encylopaedist fail? Because he is unable to recognize the time-bound, historically situated, and
culturally conditioned nature of all theories of morality, including his own. Though he claims superiority over both
the superstitious and irrational “taboo morality” of primitive, non-enlightened cultures, and the unjustified and
unjustifiably metaphysical and theological morality of his encyclopaedic ancestors; he does not recognize his own
unjustified and irrational taboos, the purportedly self-evident “ought” attached to the “reasonable” morality of the
universal “individual,” the latter being, for MacIntyre, only a “cultural artifact,” an abstract formulation and distillation
of a particular cultural prejudice:

The taboos stigmatized by the contributors to the Ninth Edition as belonging to the primitive and the savage were
only seen as alien because of the incapacity for cultural self-recognition and self-knowledge which was such a
marked characteristic of the society which they inhabited. The authors of the great canonical encyclopaedias just
because they insisted upon seeing and judging everything from their own point of view turned out to have had no
way of making themselves visible to themselves. xlvii

The encyclopaedist is open to no other conceptual scheme except his own, for he does not interpret his scheme as
merely his scheme, but as the conceptual scheme for all rational beings.
The genealogist recognizes what the encyclopaedist does not and cannot: “From the standpoint of the genealogist
the encyclopaedist is inescapably imprisoned within metaphors unrecognized as metaphors.” xlviii But although the
genealogist is by definition open to all other conceptual schemes, the price paid for his openness is the rejection of the
possible truth of any one of them, including his own. The upshot of this price is incoherence. For genealogy to exist
as an intelligible project at all, it must presuppose a conception of both the genealogical project and the self that
engages in it as historically continuous. But the genealogical self cannot possess such continuity: “Make of the
genealogist’s self nothing but what genealogy makes of it, and that self is dissolved to the point at which there is no
longer a continuous genealogical project.” MacIntyre’s argument against genealogy is dense and complicated, but its
main thesis can be condensed: In order for the genealogical project to exist as an intelligible project, it must accept
what it systematically rejects—anti-genealogical ideas:

To be unable to find the words, or rather to be able only to find words incompatible with the genealogical project,
in which to express an unironic relationship to the past which one is engaged in disowning, is to be unable to find a
place for oneself as genealogist either inside or outside the genealogical narrative and thereby to exempt oneself
from scrutiny, to make of oneself the great exception, to be self-indulgent towards, it turns out, something one knows
not what.xlix

Like the encyclopaedist, the genealogist is unable to see his project in the only light that could illumine its own
incoherencies. In identifying every assertion of moral principle, including his own assertions, as nothing but a masked
will-to-power, he renders his own assertions unmaskable by others. Encyclopaedia and genealogy are identical, then,
in being impervious to dialectical refutation, but this is tantamount to principled ignorance, as MacIntyre suggests
here: “It is only insofar as someone satisfies the conditions for rendering him or herself vulnerable to dialectical
refutation that that person can come to know whether and what he or she knows.” l The only chance the encyclopaedist
and genealogist have for self-knowledge is to engage other traditions of enquiry in dialectical argument; however,
they lack the resources for such an engagement, since neither of them understands his own or others’ traditions as
traditions. In other words, the traditions of enquiry in which they work but deny that they do so prevent them from
understanding both that they are traditions of enquiry and what a tradition of enquiry is. Christopher Thompson writes,
“Each tradition suffers from its own version of myopia: the one through a kind of reductionism in which all contenders
were submitted to a scrutiny on grounds other than their own, the other through a certain obsession with attacking
those reductionist, objectivist, and universalist agendas.”li The Thomistic tradition of enquiry, however, not only has
the resources for dialectical engagement with other traditions, but also to explain the failures of its opponents. It is the
“third way” between encyclopaedia and genealogy:

Either reason is thus impersonal, universal, and disinterested or it is the unwitting representative of particular
interests, masking their drive to power by its false pretensions to neutrality and disinterestedness. What this
alternative conceals from view is a third possibility, the possibility that reason can only move towards being
genuinely universal and impersonal insofar as it is neither neutral nor disinterested, that membership in a particular
type of moral community, one from which fundamental dissent has to be excluded, is a condition for genuinely
rational enquiry and more especially for moral and theological enquiry. lii

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St. Thomas Aquinas: Mastercraftsman
MacIntyre’s account of the Thomistic tradition of enquiry in TRV adds three new and significant elements to the
account he provided in AV and WJ, elements that indicate a development in MacIntyre’s thinking: the characterization
of rational enquiry itself as a practice, the indispensable role of personal authority in communities of enquiry, and the
necessity of realist, theistic metaphysics for rational enquiry. These are the components of any coherent and justifiable
tradition of enquiry, so what MacIntyre provides in TRV is a characterization and defense of the ideal tradition of
enquiry. MacIntyre defines rational enquiry as a practice, specifically, a craft, in which “the enquirer has to learn how
to make him or herself into a particular kind of person if he or she is to move towards a knowledge of the truth about
his or her good and about the human good. It is that which is involved in making oneself into an apprentice to a craft,
the craft in this case of philosophical enquiry.” liii As in any craft, the apprentice requires a teacher who has mastered
the craft to bring the apprentice to a state of mastery of the requisite skills and knowledge. In the case of the craft of
moral enquiry, the skills are the virtues, both moral and intellectual, and the knowledge is the good-for-man in general
and the good-for-the-enquirer in particular. The connection of the craft-model of enquiry with the model of tradition-
constituted rationality is the fact that the craft’s conception of rational enquiry, its standards for judgment and criteria
for justified claims of truth, are, like the standards of any practice within a tradition, historically situated and limited.
Yet, these tradition-bound intellectual tools enable their craftsmen to transcend their historical limits and embodiment
to attain universal and timeless truth. liv
Traditions of enquiry must be authoritative, since to become a participant in tradition, the enquirer needs to be
initiated into it by another, and to make progress in it, he requires the guidance of those already possessing knowledge
and virtue: “By accepting authority . . . one acquires a teacher who both introduces one to certain texts and educates
one into becoming the sort of person capable of reading those texts with understanding, texts in which such a person
discovers the story of him or herself, including the story of how he or she was transformed into a reader of these
texts.”lv In addition to providing the necessary training for aspirant craftsmen, traditions possess internal authorities to
protect the tradition from disintegration and compromise. Certain ideas cannot be integrated into the tradition without
“fracturing the unity of enquiry into a multitude of disagreements,” lviand so, “fundamental dissent has to be
excluded.”lvii It is not that dialectical argument within a tradition is forbidden; on the contrary, such argument is the
only way traditions can develop. It is that dialectical arguments must be, to some extent, circumscribed. All traditions
must curtail themselves in order to maintain both their existence and their rationality. MacIntyre gives an example
from the Augustinian tradition: “The practice of specifically Augustinian dialectic and the belief of the Augustinian
dialectician that this practice is a movement towards a truth never as yet wholly grasped thus presupposes the guidance
of authority. Hence when the very same authority places restrictions upon dialectic enquiry, it would be unreasonable
not to submit.”lviii
What exactly is the character of the authority that guides and restricts master and apprentice as they teach and
learn the knowledge and virtues through participation in a tradition of enquiry? The short answer is the authority of
truth. The fundamental error of the Enlightenment is not its rejection of truth per se, for that is the peculiar error of
the genealogist, but its rejection of metaphysical and theological truth. The Enlightenment thinkers kept the notion of
universal truth, but separated it from what it considered the obscurantist and discredited metaphysics of Aristotle, and
the particularist and idiosyncratic assertions of religious believers. The former they deemed simply untrue, in light of
the discoveries of the “new science,” while the latter might be true, just not in a universal, rationally intelligible
manner. Thus, neither metaphysical principle nor religious belief could serve as a foundation for moral enquiry.
MacIntyre, being an Aristotelian, accepts Aristotelian metaphysics, and, being a Thomist, accepts Thomistic theology.
Being a Thomistic intellectual historian, he sees the rejection and fragmentation of these as the fundamental error of
the Enlightenment: “The Thomistic claim, then, is that the central conceptions of distinctively modern morality, . . .
are best understood as a set of fragmentary survivals posing problems which cannot fail to be insoluble so long as they
are not restored to their place in those wholes from which they took their character as parts.” lix
One component of this “whole” is a metaphysics of being or esse. For MacIntyre, there can be no escape from
the interminable arguments of modern moral discourse without recourse to a conception of truth that is “more than
warranted assertibility.” Once one accepts the possibility of an epistemological crisis in one’s own tradition, and the
existence of some other tradition or traditions that could both avoid this particular crisis and explain its provenance,
he must also accept the existence of a truth not reducible to mere coherence within, but independent and judgmental
of, one’s own theoretical scheme:

For to claim that such an overall scheme of concepts is true is to claim that no fundamental reality could ever be
disclosed about which it is impossible to speak truly within that scheme. . . . Hence in judging of truth and falsity
there is always some ineliminable reference beyond the scheme within which those judgments are made and beyond

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 the criteria which provides the warrants for assertibility within that scheme. . . . And a conception of what is which
is more and other than a conception of what appears to be the case in the light of the most fundamental criteria
governing assertibility within any particular scheme is correspondingly required, that is, a metaphysics of being, of
esse, over and above whatever can be said about particular entia in the light of particular concepts.lx

The other essential component missing from modern moral theory is theology. MacIntyre insists that “there is then an
ineliminable theological dimension . . . to enquiry conceived in an Aristotelian mode. For enquiry aspires to and is
intelligible only in terms of its aspiration to finality, comprehensiveness and unity of explanation and understanding.” lxi
A metaphysics of being is not sufficient by itself to explain reality in the final, comprehensive, and unified way it must
be to be fully intelligible, and so it cannot sustain a coherent tradition of enquiry; it is incomplete without revealed
theology: “So an Aristotelian account of nature, both theoretical and practical, was not merely harmonized with an
Augustinian supernatural theology but shown to require it for its completion, if the universe is to be intelligible in the
way in which parts relate to wholes.” lxii Ethical inquiry in the Thomistic tradition is especially inseparable from
theological belief and ecclesial practice since it involves matters directly related to the supernatural. MacIntyre would
support the conclusion that the main cause of the problems in Jacques Maritain’s political thought is his attempt to
separate political activity from the particularities of theological belief: “Ethics in both Greek practice and Aristotelian
thought was part of politics; the understanding of the moral and intellectual virtues, in both medieval practice and
Thomistic thought, was part of theology. To abstract the ethics from its place in either is already to distort.” lxiii

i. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 11.

ii. Ibid., 52.
iii. Ibid., 55.
iv. Ibid., 59.
v. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, ix.
vi. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 74.
vii. Ibid., 114.
viii. Ibid., 117.
ix. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 7.
x. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 146-147.
xi. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 350.
xii. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 146.
xiii. Ibid., 148.
xiv. Ibid.
xv. Ibid., 187.
xvi. Ibid.
xvii. Ibid., 191.
xviii. Ibid., 194.
xix. Ibid., 216.
xx. Ibid.
xxi. Ibid., 219.
xxii. Ibid., 221.
xxiii. Ibid.
xxiv. Ibid., 258.
xxv. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, ix.
xxvi. Ibid., 1-2.
xxvii. Ibid., 6.
xxviii. bid., 7.
xxix. Ibid., 334.
xxx. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 223.
xxxi. Jean Porter, “Tradition in the Recent Work of Alasdair MacIntyre,” in Alasdair MacIntyre, ed. Mark Murphy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 42.
xxxii. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 222.
xxxiii. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 353.
xxxiv. Ibid., 367.
xxxv. Ibid., 354.
xxxvi. Ibid., 360.
xxxvii. Ibid.
xxxviii. Thomas Hibbs identifies a tension in, on the one hand, MacIntyre’s implicit denial of the capacity for human
knowledge of absolute, final truths, and his professed adherence to the dogmatic “final truths” of the Catholic Church, on the other.
This tension suggests that the particular tradition of Christianity may not quite fit MacIntyre’s general characterization of tradition.
See Hibbs, “MacIntyre’s Postmodern Thomism: Reflections on Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry,” The Thomist 57 (1993):

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288: “But what is the relationship between theology and tradition-constituted inquiry? MacIntyre depicts the latter as offering only
the ‘best so far’ and as always open to the possibility of radical reversal. Indeed, he describes Thomas’s own project in just these
terms. Yet he also speaks of the ‘finality of Scripture and dogmatic tradition.’” See also Hibbs, “MacIntyre, Tradition, and the
Christian Philosopher,” The Modern Schoolman LXVIII (March 1991): 218, 219: “Is it not the case that Christianity claims a
special status, that its focus on the person of Christ as ‘the way, the truth, and the life’ precludes its being treated as a tradition in
MacIntyre’s sense? . . . the starting point of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, while it may be contingent in time and place, has as its
source the infallible authority of Deus revelans.” I discuss this tension in Chapter Six.
xxxix. Micah Lott, “Reasonably Traditional: Self-Contradiction and Self-Reference in Alasdair MacIntyre’s Account of
Tradition-Based Rationality,” Journal of Religious Ethics 30, no. 3 (2002).
xl. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 359. Yet, as MacIntyre notes in his most recent book, simply because one’s
present account of reality might have to be reformed or discarded due to the discovery of its deficiencies in the light of newly
encountered evidence, this does not mean that one is never justified in asserting the truth of one’s present understanding: “We find
that we have good reason to reject or revise, sometimes radically, our earlier accounts of what the foundations, the first principles,
of this particular science are. But, until and unless we find that we have good reason to do so, we have no reason to put in question
our present understanding of those foundations. The knowledge that we may later on need to reject or to revise—the knowledge,
that is, of our own fallibility—of itself gives us no reason to reject or revise.” MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities, 118.
xli. Ibid., 362-364.
xlii. Ibid., 400.
xliii. Ibid., 8.
xliv. Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 125.
xlv. Ibid., 117.
xlvi. Ibid., 191.
xlvii. Ibid., 185.
xlviii. Ibid., 43.
xlix. Ibid., 214.
l. Ibid., 200.
li. Christopher J. Thompson, “Benedict, Thomas, or Augustine? The Character of MacIntyre’s Narrative,” The Thomist 59,
no. 3 (1995): 390.
lii. MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition, 59.
liii. Ibid., 61.
liv. Ibid., 63-65.
lv. Ibid., 92.
lvi. Ibid., 66.
lvii. Ibid., 59.
lviii. Ibid., 92-93.
lix. Ibid., 192.
lx. Ibid. Cf. “First Principles, Final Ends and Contemporary Philosophical Issues” in The MacIntyre Reader, 197. Here
MacIntyre suggests that an Aristotelian, teleological narrative and metaphysical conceptual structure is virtually inescapable, as
witnessed by its tendency to crop up in the philosophical thought of even those who explicitly repudiate it: “It is not, of course, that
such narratives themselves find an explicit place for distinctively Aristotelian, let alone Thomistic conceptions of truth, rationality
and intentionality. It is rather that they presuppose standards of truth and rationality independent of the enquirer, founded on
something other than social agreement, but rather imposing requirements upon what it is rational to agree to, and directing the
enquirer towards the achievement of a good in the light of which the enquirer’s progress is to be judged. These presuppositions can
be elucidated in a number of different and competing ways, but it is difficult and perhaps impossible to do so without returning to
just that type of framework for narrative provided in the early chapters of Metaphysics A. It is thus unsurprising that, so long as
this type of narrative survives in a culture, so long also Aristotelian and Thomistic conceptions are apt to recur even among those
who believe themselves long since liberated from them.” For an interesting but ultimately unpersuasive critique of MacIntyre’s
argument that an Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysical and theological framework is essential to all rational enquiry, see Fabrizio
Trifiró, “Macintyre’s Tensions: Between Anti-liberal Foundationalism and Antifoundationalist Liberalism,” Etica & Politica, VIII,
2 (2006): 127-158. Trifiró characterizes MacIntyre’s conception of rationality, especially as it is articulated in Whose Justice?
Which Rationality?, as ultimately antifoundationalist in its tradition-dependence and rejection of tradition-neutral foundationalism.
In light of this conception, Trifiró interprets MacIntyre’s Aristotelian-Thomistic defense of the existence and rational availability
of tradition-transcending truth as incoherent and as unjustified as the Enlightenment’s. In my view, Trifiró’s own antifoundationalist
stance limits his ability fully and accurately to comprehend MacIntyre’s thought; yes, there is certainly a tension, but there is no
contradiction, in MacIntyre’s attempt to reconcile tradition-dependence with tradition-transcendence. However, as we shall discuss
in Chapter Six, this tension does ultimately lead to a contradiction, but not in MacIntyre’s moral or epistemological theory; it can
be seen in its political application. This contradiction, however, does not suggest any defect in Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysical
realism. It is a problem specific to MacIntyre’s political thought.
lxi. MacIntyre, “First Principles, Final Ends, and Contemporary Philosophical Issues,” 184.
lxii. MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition, 123.
lxiii. Ibid., 191.

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