He reminded us that life is mainly about love and friendship, not reason and will.

He was 100% right unless you happened to be living in Ukraine, where the EU and Putin were acting without 'reason". Love and friendship is what matters, but hard to pursue if you're surrounded by folks who have their head up their ass.

Humanity According to Alasdair MacIntrye

He reminded us that life is mainly about love and friendship, not reason and will.

By O. Carter Snead, WSJ

June 5, 2025 5:21 pm ET

One of the world’s greatest Catholic philosophers died May 21. Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre was 96.

Normally classified as a philosopher of ethics, MacIntyre was a fierce critic of modern ethical theory. His writings drew deeply from a wide array of fields, including theology, social science, psychology, history and literature, but he never pursued a doctorate. Born in Glasgow, he received master’s degrees from Manchester and Oxford, later telling a student: “I won’t go so far as to say that you have a deformed mind if you have a Ph.D., but you will have to work extra hard to remain educated.”

In his most famous work, “After Virtue” (1981), MacIntyre contended that moral discourse in the 20th century had become fragmented and largely meaningless, an outcome he believed inevitable given modernity’s rejection of “any view of man as having an essence which defines his true end.” The dominant forms of moral theory, such as Immanuel Kant’s deontology and John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism, fail, MacIntyre believed, because they treat mankind only as it happens to be, rather than as it ought to be, in light of our human ends. “After Virtue” confronts its reader with the choice of Nietzsche or Aristotle—an embrace of postmodern amoralism or a return to a tradition of the virtues.

MacIntyre expressed sharp differences with standard approaches to technology, business and medical ethics. “Applied ethics is not only based upon a mistake, but upon one that has proved to be harmfully influential,” he wrote in a 1984 paper. The mistake was to think of morality as an abstract, reductive concept, a “view from nowhere,” instead of what it is: embodied in shared behaviors, embedded in traditions and reflected in practices and social forms.

He defied political categorization and strenuously objected to anyone who tried to claim him for a particular ideology. In 1983, at 55, he converted from atheism to Catholicism. As a philosopher, having begun life as a Marxist, he realized that he had become an Aristotelian Thomist—Aristotle corrected and refined through the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas. Years of trying to disprove Thomism to his students, he said, eventually led him to embrace it.

I worked with Alasdair for 12 years at the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame, which he made his intellectual home after stints at several universities in the U.S. and U.K., and I know he would have disliked the idea of a laudatory obituary. He never wanted anyone to make a fuss over him. Pomposity and self-importance were foreign to him. He loved talking to ordinary people about ordinary things—their families, their interests, Notre Dame football.

MacIntyre’s legacy is vast and important, but one part of it stands out to me: his influence on bioethics, even though he largely ignored the field as such.

Bioethicists often invoke the concept of “personhood” to define the ontological, moral and legal boundaries of humanity. “Persons” have human rights, deserve our moral concern and are entitled to protection from unjust harms. Not so for “nonpersons.” Many bioethicists define persons narrowly and include only those currently capable of active cognition, self-awareness and stable formulation of desires. This definition makes a particular kind of intellectual agency the threshold for membership in the moral community. It also excludes many—from young children to those suffering from cognitive impairments owing to disability or senescence—and thus sets them outside the scope of justice.

In his book “Dependent Rational Animals” (1999), MacIntyre reminds us that life humanly lived isn’t simply or even primarily marked by the assertion of our wills but rather by vulnerability, dependence and reciprocal indebtedness. Human flourishing doesn’t depend on freedom for self-invention but requires networks of uncalculated giving and graceful receiving, composed of people willing to make the good of others their own, without counting the cost.

Such networks ensure our survival but also teach us that we are made for love and friendship. We are most human when we are caring for one another, especially the weakest and most vulnerable. Within this vision, everyone counts, not merely those at the height of their powers. Everyone is part of the human family, including the profoundly and permanently disabled. MacIntyre reminds us that we all “exist on a scale of disability,” and it was always clear to me that he had a heart for children with special needs and their families.

In his intellect, wisdom, creativity, courage and breadth of learning, Alasdair MacIntyre was unsurpassed. By his life and his writing, he taught us how to be fully human.

Mr. Snead is a professor of law at the University of Notre Dame, former director of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture and author of “What It Means to Be Human.”

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