Alasdair MacIntyre’s practical philosophy: the question of the meaning of life as the political question

Abstract

In this article we analyse Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of modernity in the context of the neo-Aristotelian question of meaningful human existence. We present his critique of modern moral ideology, the doctrine of emotivism, and its embodiments in modern institutions and practices. We claim that the central concern of this critique is the question of meaningful human life. Modernity is criticized because its social institutions and practices preclude the articulation of this question. In modernity, all value statements are pushed into the private sphere. In addition, the doctrine of emotivism denies any possibility of rational debate between different moral positions. This leads to the impossibility to distinguish between manipulative and non-manipulative social behaviour, which is embodied in several emotivist social characters, such as manager, aesthete, and therapist. Thus the modern social world is severely compartmentalized, to articulate the question of what is good and meaningful life for human beings becomes hardly possible.