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[Expositions 14.1 (2020) 1–8] Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 

After “Morality”: Alasdair MacIntyre and the Teaching of Ethics 
 
BERNARD G. PRUSAK 
King’s College (PA) 
 
 
The University of Notre Dame’s recently revised core curriculum does not require that students 

take a course in ethics. This might be thought ironic. After all, Notre Dame was the home, for the 

first decade of this century, of one of the most distinguished moral philosophers of our time, 

Alasdair MacIntyre.1 But consider this passage from a recent paper of his: 

 

Ethics has of course been in vogue for quite some time: medical ethics, legal ethics, 

journalistic ethics, the ethics of this and of that. Whenever there is serious 

malpractice, the cry goes up: Bring on the teachers of ethics! So courses, 

programmes, academic appointments, centres, have multiplied. There is now 

money to be made in ethics, even if not all that much.2 

 

The title of the paper from which that quotation is drawn is “The Irrelevance of Ethics.” 

MacIntyre’s focus there is business ethics, but he expresses as well his skepticism of “the academic 

teaching of ethics in general,” which he claims “has little or nothing to do with the formation of 

moral character and is ineffective as an instrument of moral formation.”3 (He contrasts in this 

regard boarding schools for juvenile offenders and basic training camps for the U.S. Marine 

Corps.) From his perspective, business ethics has the further strike against it that “its teaching is a 

dangerous distraction from enquiry into the nature and causes of what is morally flawed in our 

economic institutions and activities.”4 

On second thought, then, Notre Dame’s decision not to require students to take a course in 

ethics might be considered, not ironic, but consistent with MacIntyre’s thinking. Away with the 

ethicists! They are only corruptors of youth, etc.5 But the story is messier. A closer reading of the 

last quotation above suggests that MacIntyre’s skepticism about teaching ethics is targeted rather 

than global. For apparently there is an important ethical enquiry to be done, namely, “into the 

nature and causes of what is morally flawed in our economic institutions and activities.” 

MacIntyre’s complaint is that this is not done in business ethics courses as they are typically 

conceived and conducted. The upshot is that it is perhaps fitting that the Notre Dame committee 



After “Morality”: Alasdair MacIntyre and the Teaching of Ethics 2 

  

charged with examining ethics in the curriculum, though it did not argue for a required course, 

concluded by indicating ambivalence.6 

This iteration of the forum “Ethics in Focus” takes as its subject the relevance of MacIntyre’s 

work to the teaching of ethics to college students (and, in one instance, medical students). The 

contributors have been asked to focus in particular on the most recent of MacIntyre’s books, Ethics 

in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative, published 

in 2016, a year after “The Irrelevance of Ethics.” One of MacIntyre’s theses in that book is that 

“academic philosophy at some point in its past history took a wrong turning, marched off in the 

wrong direction, set itself the task, if I may borrow a metaphor, of climbing the wrong mountain.”7 

The metaphor is borrowed from Derek Parfit, who does not appear by name in the book.8 Parfit’s 

gigantic, two-volume On What Matters argues for the claim that “Kantian Contractualism implies 

Rule Consequentialism.”9 Against what he characterizes as the widely-held belief that there are 

“deep disagreements between Kantians, Contractualists, and Consequentialists,” Parfit submits 

that in fact “[t]hese people are climbing the same mountain on different sides.”10 Interestingly, 

MacIntyre does not appear in the index of either volume of On What Matters—evidence that, while 

Parfit and MacIntyre belong to the same discipline, they understand and practice it very differently. 

The opening chapter of Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity constructs an argument between 

expressivism and what MacIntyre terms NeoAristotelianism over evaluative judgments and the 

nature of practical reason. Toward the end of the chapter, MacIntyre acknowledges that, “from the 

standpoint of most […] academic practitioners of contemporary moral philosophy,” this argument 

must seem “not just mistaken but absurd.”11 For it neglects “the work of the most influential 

contributors” to the discipline—contributors like Parfit—and does not address “most of what they 

take to be its central problems.”12 (Peruse the table of contents of On What Matters.) But MacIntyre 

has an answer to readers puzzled by the idiosyncrasy of his project: 

 

The largest single difference between [most academic practitioners of 

contemporary moral philosophy] and me is perhaps this, that they find what they 

identify as the subject matter of their enquiry as unproblematic, while I do not. That 

subject matter they take to be Morality, a set of rules, ideals, and judgments 

concerning duties and obligations that are to be distinguished from religious, legal, 

political, and aesthetic rules, ideals, and judgments.13 



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MacIntyre explains that he capitalizes Morality in order to distinguish it from the moralities—the 

sets of rules, ideals, and judgments—studied by anthropologists. But he goes on to claim that 

Morality is in fact “the morality of advanced modernity,” rather than what most academic 

practitioners of contemporary moral philosophy take it to be, namely, “a set of impersonal rules, 

entitled to the assent of any rational agent whatsoever,” which for MacIntyre is only the most basic 

of its “pretensions.”14 And this is not all. According to MacIntyre, contemporary philosophical 

theorizing about Morality, “instead of illuminating the realities with which we have to deal as 

rational agents,” not only “misleads and distorts,” but even “has the social function of misleading 

and distorting.”15 

The puzzle MacIntyre asks us to consider is why the norms of Morality—more or less a strict 

Kantianism with allowance for reasonable consequentialist excuses—enjoy a generally recognized 

authority when its “most acute theorists, utilitarian, Kantian, and contractarian, remain in 

permanent disagreement” about the basis of that authority.16 In other words, there is or at least 

appears to be a general consensus about the norms of Morality, a consensus that makes a 

synthesizing project like Parfit’s project conceivable.17 But how can this consensus be when even 

projects like Parfit’s multiply rather than resolve disagreements about what reason there is “for 

adopting the impersonal standpoint of Morality or […] according an overriding importance to its 

claims”?18 MacIntyre’s answer is that the norms of Morality, which Parfit takes for granted in the 

elaborate and even fantastical thought experiments he uses to develop his synthesis,19 are 

embedded within and integral to the economic and political systems of late modernity. On What 

Matters, to use the same example, is quasi-otherworldly in its abstraction from economic, political, 

and cultural realities. The cover photographs of St. Petersburg without any people are telling in 

this regard. The conflicts and complexities of late modernity are out of the picture, literally and 

figuratively. Against this background, recall MacIntyre’s criticism of business ethics as “a 

dangerous distraction from enquiry into the nature and causes of what is morally flawed in our 

economic institutions and activities.”20 On MacIntyre’s account, philosophical theorizing like 

Parfit’s is no better. It has the social function of misleading and distorting by abstracting and 

thereby distracting from the social and political order that is its home. 

Readers should go to Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity to decide for themselves whether they 

find persuasive MacIntyre’s account of the “structuring of desires” by what he terms the ethics-of-



After “Morality”: Alasdair MacIntyre and the Teaching of Ethics 4 

  

the-state, the ethics-of-the-market (both “parodies of ethics”), and Morality.21 Suffice it to say here 

that MacIntyre himself finds expressivism “convincing” about Morality: “each contending party’s 

Moral judgments give expression to underlying prerational commitments, to attitudes and 

sentiments that find expression in the unargued premises of [the parties’] arguments.”22 

NeoAristotelianism, he recognizes, has problems and challenges of its own—new for MacIntyre, 

Bernard Williams figures as a formidable critic as well as an ally23—but MacIntyre counts as 

among its advantages that it is grounded in the study of moralities,24 or otherwise put the practices 

of “plain persons,” who appear so often in the book that they should have had an entry in the index. 

Attention to practice, MacIntyre proposes, has “as one of its outcomes a conception of the practical 

life as a life of enquiry whose evaluative conclusions at each stage of that life accord with or fail 

to accord with the facts concerning human flourishing, that is, are true or false,” over and against 

both expressivism and the quasi-realism that has succeeded it.25 As MacIntyre elsewhere puts the 

same point more simply, “it is only at the level of practice that we can become Aristotelians” who 

recognize both standards of goodness independent of our feelings, attitudes, and choices and our 

need for the virtues in order to flourish as human beings in the particular situations of our lives.26 

MacIntyre presents Thomas Aquinas as a teacher of teachers. According to MacIntyre, the first 

and second parts of the second part of the Summa theologiae “provide […] instruction as to how 

to educate in practical reasoning.”27 MacIntyre himself may be considered a teacher of teachers. 

As a review of Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity remarks, “The methodology of contemporary 

moral philosophy is almost as important an issue for MacIntyre as the substantive ethical theory 

he defends. He thinks that much of what we produce in the academy, in the field of moral and 

political philosophy, is sterile and insignificant.”28 And he means for us to do better, both in print 

and in the classroom. 

Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity is studded with asides about moral education. For example, 

MacIntyre is emphatic about the need for what he calls sociological self-knowledge: knowledge 

and understanding of one’s roles and relationships and “what in those roles and relationships is 

consonant with the exercise of rational agency and what through the contingencies of an imposed 

set of structures inhibits or distorts that exercise.”29 He notes that “[e]ducation into the virtues 

consists in key part in making those so educated aware in detail of the possibilities of error and of 

the errors to which each of them will be particularly inclined,” at which point he discusses the 

recent work of several social psychologists.30 He comments that “[a]n education focused too 



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exclusively on skills, on means, leaves [students] without an adequate sense of the ends that should 

be theirs as contrasted with the ends that others for their own purposes impose on them,”31 and he 

laments that “[t]he education of [students’] preferences is taken to be no part of their schooling.”32 

Finally, he states, parenthetically, that “[o]ne test of whether a particular academic course in ethics 

is or is not being taught in a morally serious way is whether or not its students are taught that a 

close reading of certain novels is indispensable to their learning […].”33 

Those reflections seem to permit the conclusion that the academic teaching of ethics, decried 

in “The Irrelevance of Ethics,” is not purposeless or hopeless—that even a general education ethics 

course in a core curriculum might do some good for its students in the hands of a studied 

practitioner, in any event one who has learned from MacIntyre. But what such a course would look 

like and involve, other than perhaps the reading of certain novels or at least the injunction to read 

certain novels, is by no means clear from MacIntyre’s book. To be more specific, after Morality, 

what would a business ethics course or a bioethics course look like and involve? A more 

fundamental question is of course whether a teacher of ethics has reason to reform her or his 

courses in light of MacIntyre’s criticisms of Morality, which is also to ask whether that criticism, 

and MacIntyre’s own NeoAristotelianism, are persuasive. 

The contributors to this iteration of “Ethics in Focus” are Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, 

Professor of Philosophy, Calvin College; Ashleen Menchaca-Bagnulo, Assistant Professor of 

Political Science, Texas State University; Regan Reitsma, Professor of Philosophy, King’s 

College; Daniel P. Rhodes, Faculty Coordinator of Contextual Education and Instructor in Social 

Justice, Institute of Pastoral Studies, Loyola University Chicago, and M. Therese Lysaught, 

Professor, Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics and Health Policy, Stritch School of Medicine, and 

Institute of Pastoral Studies, Loyola University Chicago; Jordan Rodgers, Visiting Assistant 

Professor of Management, King’s College; Joel Shuman, Professor of Theology, King’s College; 

and Emily Trancik, Director of Ethics Integration, Ascension Health Care Network. 

 

Notes 

1. MacIntyre remains, in his nineties, a research fellow at the de Nicola Center for Ethics and 

Culture at the University of Notre Dame. 



After “Morality”: Alasdair MacIntyre and the Teaching of Ethics 6 

  

2. Alasdair MacIntyre, “The Irrelevance of Ethics,” in Virtue and the Economy: Essays on 

Morality and Markets, eds. Andrius Bielskis and Kelvin Knight (New York: Routledge, 

2015), 7–21, at 8. 

3. Ibid. 

4. Ibid. 

5. Compare Elizabeth Anscombe, “Does Oxford Moral Philosophy Corrupt Youth?” in 

Human Life, Action and Ethics: Essays by G.E.M. Anscombe, eds. Mary Geach and Luke 

Gormally (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2005), 161–167. Anscombe answers no, Oxford 

moral philosophy does not corrupt youth, but her reason is that youth are already corrupted 

by the times, with which “Oxford moral philosophy is perfectly in tune” so that it “might 

be called the philosophy of the flattery of [the] spirit” of the times (163, 167). 

6. See “Report of the Catholic Mission Focus Group,” October 11, 2015, 20, recommending 

“incentives to increase courses in ethics” and requesting “the oversight of the core to 

include a review of the extent to which we are succeeding in educating students in ethics,” 

available at  

http://curriculumreview.nd.edu/assets/183213/nd_core_curriculum_review_committee_c

atholic_mission_focus_group_final_report.pdf. 

7. Alasdair MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical 

Reasoning, and Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 34–35. 

8. But see also the allusion on 66. 

9. Derek Parfit, On What Matters, ed. Samuel Scheffler, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University 

Press, 2011), 417. 

10. Ibid., 419. 

11. MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, 64. 

12. Ibid. 

13. Ibid., 64–65. 

14. Ibid., 65, 68. See also 77, where he characterizes “‘Morality’” (here in scare quotes) as “the 

presently dominant moral system in advanced societies, which [contemporary 

philosophical theorizing] presents as morality as such,” and 114–115, where “the name 

‘Morality’” is given to “the moral system peculiar to and characteristic of early and late 

capitalist modernity.” 



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15. Ibid., 78. See the following discussion of Hume’s moral philosophy, 79–85. 

16. Ibid., 119. 

17. See Ibid., 136. 

18. Ibid. See also 138. 

19. MacIntyre comments, “Technicolor examples […] are by now stock cases in many moral 

philosophy classes.” See ibid., 116. 

20. MacIntyre, “The Irrelevance of Ethics,” 8. 

21. See MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, 124–136. See 128 for the 

characterization of the ethics-of-the-state and the ethics-of-the-market as “parodies of 

ethics.” 

22. Ibid., 140–141. Consider in this regard the app for ethical decision making developed by 

the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. See 

https://legacy.scu.edu/ethics/ethical-decision/. The app asks its user to evaluate a possible 

course of action in terms of its utility, its bearing on others’ rights, its justice (that is, 

whether it gives each person her or his due), its effects on the community as a whole, and 

the character traits it exhibits or is likely to develop. After the user has “weigh[ed] each 

perspective,” the app gives the proposed action a score on a scale of 0–100 and judges it 

as “probably ethical,” “questionable,” or “not liv[ing] up to your values and criteria.” 

23. Williams figures as a critic for his questions posed to Aristotle’s ethics; see ibid., 158–165 

and 220–231. He figures as an ally for his criticism of what he called, peculiarly, “the 

peculiar institution” of morality. See Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of 

Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), chapter 10, 174–196. 

24. See Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, 117–118 for the contrast between 

NeoAristotelianism and Morality. 

25. Ibid., 40. 

26. See Alasdair MacIntyre, “On Having Survived the Academic Moral Philosophy of the 

Twentieth Century,” in What Happened in and to Moral Philosophy in the Twentieth 

Century? Philosophical Essays in Honor of Alasdair MacIntyre, ed. Fran O’Rourke (Notre 

Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 17–34, at 27. 

27. MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, 89. 



After “Morality”: Alasdair MacIntyre and the Teaching of Ethics 8 

  

28. Richard Kraut, review of Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, 

Practical Reasoning, and Narrative, by Alasdair MacIntyre, Notre Dame Philosophical 

Reviews, January 17, 2018, available at https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/ethics-in-the-conflicts-

of-modernity-an-essay-on-desire-practical-reasoning-and-narrative/. 

29. MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, 211. Compare his paper “Social Structures 

and Their Threats to Moral Agency,” Philosophy 74 (1999): 311–329. 

30. Ibid., 191. 

31. Ibid., 173. 

32. Ibid., 174. 

33. Ibid., 219. The paragraph that this sentence concludes references Jane Austen, George 

Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Iris Murdoch, and D.H. Lawrence. 


