The Ethical Realism of Alasdair MacIntyre: Identity and Community in ‘After Virtue’

Abstract

The essay illustrates how MacIntyre’s After Virtue offers a constructive critique of modern individualism through the concept of “practice”, which is at the basis of MacIntyre’s ethical realism and constitutive of the narrative identity of self, based on the Aristotelian anthropology of human perfection. The essay takes into consideration the concept of community, highlighting the differences between MacIntyre and Communitarianism. The last section focuses on education, its crisis in advanced modernity, and how MacIntyre’s perspective offers an avenue for overcoming that crisis by means of the realism inherent in virtuous education.