After Virtue

⚖The case for it

MacIntyre's first hundred pages explain why public arguments about war or abortion never end: the rival sides quote from moral systems that no longer exist, so their premises never meet and nobody is persuaded. Read that once and you hear it everywhere, in op-eds and at dinner tables. He also attempts what few philosophers do, an account of a single human life as a story with a shape you can judge. What he wants built in place of the wreckage stays blurry, and the closing turn to Aristotle asks for more faith than it argues for. Read him for the wreckage. Nothing else cuts as close.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Diagnosis is nine-tenths of the book, and the cure is a gesture. MacIntyre demolishes Enlightenment ethics with relish, then offers Aristotle, practices, and tradition in terms vague enough that thirty years of commentary still argues about what he meant. Whose tradition? Which community? He famously ends waiting for a new Benedict, which is hope, not a plan.

— the honest librarian