Although he influenced me greatly, I never met Alasdair MacIntyre. I have no personal remembrances that I can impart. I first came across his work in seminary while taking Stanley Hauerwas’s course in Christian ethics. As I recall, After Virtue was not on the reading list but Hauerwas made constant reference to it. I purchased a copy, took it with me on a youth retreat, and read it late into the evening convinced that MacIntyre had given expression to a sense of loss that I acutely felt was present in modern culture. Emotivism, nihilism, characterizations of cultural roles as bureaucrat-managers, therapists, and aesthetes seemed to capture the zeitgeist. I was hooked and began to read everything that I could find.
Nearly everything I’ve written has some MacIntyrean influence behind it, including a section, “MacIntyre’s Politics of Resistance,” in my 2024 On Teaching and Learning Christian Ethics. That section sets forth the MacIntyre that I inherited from Hauerwas, a MacIntyre who combined Aristotle, Marxism, and Thomism, along with the philosophy of action from G.E.M. Anscombe, and offers a politics of resistance within modernity without falling prey to illiberal or postliberal political temptations.
I confess that I was not always convinced that this was where MacIntyre’s work led. Twenty-six years ago I received a call from a university in Wales. It was going to celebrate MacIntyre’s 70th birthday with a conference, and he had offered my name as a speaker. I was surprised and elated and of course said yes. Then I learned that the conference would be on Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics and I said, “You have the wrong Steve Long.”
The person inviting me insisted that it was me. I insisted otherwise. He said he would call MacIntyre and get back with me. Some minutes later came the call, “I’m so sorry. You are the wrong Steve Long.” I was not surprised but found this somewhat puzzling. Steven A. Long’s Aristotelian Thomism is radically different from the grammatical Thomism that I learned from Hauerwas, infused as it is with a critique of pure nature, an insistence on Christology as our guide for understanding what it means to be human, and a rapprochement with the work of Karl Barth and the nouvelle théoligie. Steven A. Long rejects all these convictions. He defends a doctrine of pure nature and claims that the virtue of justice includes prayer and worship that should be part of a state project. I worry that a doctrine of pure nature leads to a reactionary politics, so I wondered if Hauerwas misled me. Perhaps MacIntyre was what some claimed him to be, a reactionary.
Susan Moller Okin and Jeffrey Stout found in MacIntyre’s tradition-dependent rationality a reactionary traditionalism because one version of it required submission to authoritative institutions and texts. I did not find this a convincing interpretation, but MacIntyre’s sharp distinction between philosophy and theology, his constant focus on natural, acquired virtues (as opposed to infused and theological), the lack of Christology in his work, and the refusal to distance his work from its use by illiberal sources (his critique of Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option being an important exception) led me to wonder if his work inclined toward the reactionary politics that had overtaken the evangelical and Catholic right in the past few decades.
MacIntyre’s 2016 Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity put to rest any anxieties that I may have had. Along with the important interpretation of MacIntyre by the philosophers Paul Blackledge, Kelvin Knight, and Neil Davidson, that book renewed my conviction that MacIntyre offers us one of the most important forms of political resistance to the dominance of managerial capitalism today. It also makes it more difficult to teach ethics, and all the more necessary to teach it well.
I teach an undergraduate course called “The Good Life.” I always begin with MacIntyre’s essay, “The Irrelevance of Ethics.” He concludes that essay with these three points:
My first conclusion, I should remind you, was that we have no good reason to believe that the teaching of ethics through academic courses can be effective in bringing about moral transformations.
My second conclusion was that an effective education into the virtues would in fact disqualify one for a successful career in the financial sector.
And my third conclusion has been that the present content of even an ethics of the virtues is such and the ways in which we think about money are such that we are generally at a loss when we try to connect them.[1]
As someone who has taught theological and philosophical ethics for more than three decades, I find MacIntyre’s conclusions here to be an essential guide for what it is those of us tasked with teaching ethics should be about. First, MacIntyre reminds us that imparting methods and decision-making procedures to students is not only irrelevant but also harmful. Second, he puts us in tension with the dominance of our universities, whose primary concern for students as customers to be ROI. Third, he calls us not to separate ethics from economics, money from language and other forms of communication, and to attend not only to human action as the subject matter of ethics but intelligible human action. That is to say, ethics does not have a distinct subject matter as Henry Sidgwick set forth in his influential Methods. For Sidgwick, ethics is “the science or study of what is right or what ought to be, so far as this depends upon the voluntary action of individuals.”[2]
For MacIntyre, the “ought” plays no role in ethics. Anscombe taught us this and MacIntyre built upon it by reminding us that we do not look to identify action per se as the source as that which ethics, philosophical or theological, examines but ethics located in a history, a tradition (known or unknown), and a form of sociality. As MacIntyre put it, every ethics presupposes a sociology. If we teach, write, or speak about ethics without attending to that sociology, to the political and economic formations that render it intelligible, then what we are doing is not only irrelevant, but also deleterious. It would be better to side with Nietzsche and acknowledge ethics is nothing more than a disguised will to power and a “soporific appliance.” This last observation, of course, returns us to Aristotle, for whom ethics was also a form of politics. And if we follow MacIntyre, it will point in the direction of Aquinas and Marx.
Following MacIntyre from his earlier writings on Marxism through the decade-long silence that predates After Virtue and into his Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity leads as far away from a reactionary politics as one could get. Yet I still have a lingering question that I would have liked to take up with him. He concludes Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity with this statement:
So there is presupposed some further good, an object of desire beyond all particular and finite goods, a good toward which desire tends insofar as it remains unsatisfied by even the most desirable of finite goods, as in good lives, it does. But here the enquiries of politics and ethics end. Here natural theology begins.[3]
Why natural theology? Why not Jesus? One of MacIntyre’s colleagues once said, “we know MacIntyre was converted to Aristotle. It’s not yet clear he was converted to Jesus.” That was said in jest, of course, and should not be taken as the last word on MacIntyre’s work. But his fear of fideism and his conviction that Barth made him an atheist (for a time) may have caused him too much hesitation in appealing to revelation. He also reminds us, with Aquinas, that grace corrects and perfects nature. We remember MacIntyre best, perhaps, by showing how his work points not only to natural theology but also to the mysteries of the faith.
[1] In Bielskis, Andrius, and Kelvin Knight. Virtue and Economy: Essays on Morality and Markets, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/southernmethodist/detail.action?docID=4442510.
[2] Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1981 [1907], 4.
[3] Ethics in the Conflict of Modernity. 2016. 315.
D. Stephen Long, Ph.D. is Cary M. Maguire University Professor of Ethics at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University. The author or editor of fourteen books, including The Perfectly Simple Triune God: Aquinas and His Legacy (Fortress, 2016), Long is ordained in the United Methodist Church. Previous appointments include Marquette University, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, St. Joseph’s University, and Duke Divinity School.
