4 - After Virtue’s Critique of Liberalism

Summary

This chapter revisits Alasdair MacIntyre’s influential critique of liberalism in After Virtue. First, I lay out some of the core themes and key steps in MacIntyre’s critique of what he calls ‘modern liberal individualism’. Along the way, I highlight affinities between MacIntyre’s critique and other anti-liberal arguments – both from the left and the right, older and more contemporary. I argue that the central claim in MacIntyre’s critique, the claim on which the critique ultimately succeeds or fails, is that, for liberalism, ‘there are no facts about what is valuable. “Fact” becomes value-free, “is” becomes a stranger to “ought” and explanation, as well as evaluation, changes its character as a result of this divorce between “is” and “ought”’ (After Virtue: 81). Under the false cover of a claim to ethical neutrality, MacIntyre argues, liberalism thus reduces the human person to an isolated individual. And it claims that there is nothing to be understood about ‘the good’ apart from the extent to which the preferences of these isolated individuals are satisfied. The main goals of the chapter are (1) to assess how well MacIntyre’s critique holds up after forty years and (2) to determine whether there are resources in liberal theory, classical or more contemporary, that can provide a response to the central elements of his critique.