Alasdair MacIntyre and the Cultural Relativity of Virtues

What does it mean to be courageous? In ancient Homeric Greece, courage meant dying honorably in battle. In a medieval Christian community, it meant enduring hardship for one’s faith. In a modern corporation, it might mean whistleblowing against your employer. The word is the same, but the content shifts dramatically across time and place. This observation is not a trivial curiosity – for Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, it is the very foundation of understanding what virtues are and how they work. MacIntyre’s position on the cultural relativity of virtues challenges the idea that morality can be separated from the communities and histories that produce it, offering one of the most consequential critiques of modern ethical thinking in the twentieth century.

MacIntyre’s starting point: the disorder of modern moral discourse 🔗

MacIntyre’s landmark 1981 work, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, opens with a striking diagnosis. He argues that contemporary moral discussions have lost their coherence – that ethical arguments today feel like shouting matches where each side talks past the other, because the shared moral vocabulary that once gave such arguments meaning has collapsed. He attributes this collapse to the Enlightenment’s ambition to ground morality in universal reason, stripped of any historical or communal roots. That project, MacIntyre contends, failed – and the failure left modern societies with moral language that sounds objective but functions as little more than an expression of personal preference.

This condition, which MacIntyre calls emotivism, is the idea that moral statements like “honesty is good” or “cruelty is wrong” are not objective claims at all, but merely expressions of subjective attitudes. When moral language is reduced to this level, there is no longer any shared standard against which competing claims can be evaluated. The result, he argues, is the fragmented ethical landscape we see today: interminable debates with no resolution, because the very grounds for settling such debates have been dismantled.

Why virtues cannot be separated from their context 🔗

MacIntyre’s core argument is that virtues do not exist in a vacuum. They are intelligible only within specific historical, cultural, and social frameworks. When you strip a virtue of that context – when you try to define “courage” or “justice” in the abstract, for all people, at all times – you are not uncovering its true essence; you are actually distorting it. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, MacIntyre’s work directly raises the question of whether different cultures embody different virtues, and whether moral rules can therefore only pick out right and wrong actions relative to a particular cultural context.

To understand what MacIntyre means concretely, consider the virtue of loyalty. In a tribal society, loyalty to one’s kinship group might be the highest moral obligation. In a liberal democracy, loyalty to an abstract principle – the rule of law, say – might override loyalty to family. Neither of these is “wrong” in isolation; each makes sense within its setting. MacIntyre’s point is that the virtue of loyalty cannot be properly understood without knowing the social roles, relationships, and shared goals that give it its specific content. Virtues are always virtues for a particular kind of human being living in a particular kind of community.

The three-stage account: practices, narrative, and tradition 🔗

Rather than simply observing that virtues vary across cultures, MacIntyre builds a systematic philosophical framework to explain why this variation is not arbitrary or relativistic. He organizes his account around three interconnected concepts: practices, narrative, and tradition.

Practices and their internal goods 🔗

MacIntyre defines a virtue as an acquired human quality whose possession enables a person to achieve the goods internal to practices, while its absence makes achieving those goods impossible. A practice, in his technical sense, is any coherent and complex socially established activity – medicine, farming, chess, architecture – that has its own internal standards of excellence. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, MacIntyre argues that achieving the goods internal to a practice requires the presence of virtues such as justice, courage, and honesty – virtues that are needed to sustain the relationships among practitioners and uphold shared standards. Virtues therefore arise from and are calibrated by the particular practices that structure a community’s way of life. A society of hunters develops different specific virtues than a society of merchants, because what counts as excellence differs across these activities.

MacIntyre also distinguishes sharply between internal goods – those that can only be achieved by participating in a practice (the excellence of a well-argued legal case, the craftsmanship in a well-built house) – and external goods like money, status, and power, which can be obtained through many means. Modern institutions, he warns, constantly threaten to corrupt practices by pushing external goods to the center, undermining the virtues that a genuine practice requires.

The narrative unity of a human life 🔗

The second stage of MacIntyre’s account moves from practices to the individual person. He argues that virtues do not make sense when applied to isolated actions. A single courageous deed does not tell us whether someone is courageous; we need to understand the arc of a person’s life, their intentions, beliefs, and the setting in which they act. This is why MacIntyre insists that narrative is central to ethics. As the Church Life Journal at the University of Notre Dame explains, the intelligibility of a person’s life depends on the stock of descriptions available at a particular time, place, and culture – meaning we are always, at best, co-authors of our own life stories, writing within narratives inherited from our communities.

Without this narrative unity, virtues become detached from any meaningful purpose. A culture that no longer provides its members with coherent life-stories cannot sustain genuine virtue.

Tradition as the living context of virtue 🔗

The third and broadest stage is tradition. For MacIntyre, virtues find their full point and purpose in sustaining the historical traditions that give both practices and individual lives their necessary context. A tradition, in his view, is not a static inheritance from the past; it is a living, ongoing argument about what constitutes the good life – one that develops over time as a community encounters new challenges and rivals. As the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy observes, rationality itself, for MacIntyre, is not universal but differs from community to community, developing and sometimes regressing across the course of a community’s history. Each tradition carries its own internal standards of what counts as a virtue, and these standards evolve through the tradition’s internal debates and its encounters with competing traditions.

This is why MacIntyre’s account of virtue is historicist without being purely relativist. He does not say all conceptions of virtue are equally valid; he argues that some traditions are better than others at sustaining the kind of moral reasoning that allows genuine human flourishing. Traditions can be rationally evaluated – but only from the inside, by those who have entered into them.

Virtues and the common good 🔗

A central implication of MacIntyre’s position is that virtues are not primarily about individual self-improvement. They are about what a community needs to pursue its shared goals. According to MacIntyre, morals and virtues can only be properly understood in relation to the community from which they come – a sharp contrast to liberal individualist theories that ask us to abstract ourselves from our social identities when reasoning about justice or morality.

For MacIntyre, a community that shares a vision of the good life provides the conditions under which virtues can genuinely flourish. When that shared vision disintegrates – as he believes it has in modern liberal societies – virtues lose their social function. People become, in his phrase, a “collection of strangers,” each pursuing private goals, with no overarching standard of excellence to appeal to. The bonds of justice, courage, and solidarity that once held communities together either dissolve or become purely rhetorical.

This is why MacIntyre is deeply critical of modern capitalism and liberal individualism. These systems, he argues, prioritize external goods – wealth, status, market success – over the internal goods that genuine practices cultivate. In doing so, they erode the very social fabric that makes virtuous character possible. As the Center for Practical Theology at Boston University notes, MacIntyre sees modern liberal societies as morally vacuous precisely because they deny or neglect their own narrative history and fragment persons from their community for the perpetuation of the individualist myth.

Is MacIntyre a relativist? 🔗

The most common objection to MacIntyre’s position is that it collapses into moral relativism. If virtues are relative to cultures and historical periods, does that mean there is no way to criticize the practices of another culture? Does it mean that the virtues of Nazi Germany or a caste-based society are simply valid within their own context?

MacIntyre’s answer is carefully constructed. He distinguishes between acknowledging that virtues are embedded in traditions and claiming that all traditions are equally good. In his follow-up work, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), he argues that traditions can be rationally compared. A tradition that can coherently address its internal crises, respond to objections from rival traditions, and continue to develop has stronger rational credentials than one that cannot. The fact that virtue is tradition-bound does not mean the conversation between traditions is impossible or that all moral positions are equally defensible.

MacIntyre also clarifies that virtues must satisfy standards not just within practices, but across all three stages – practices, narrative, and tradition. This triple requirement provides a more rigorous filter than pure cultural acceptance. A practice that degrades its participants, even if culturally endorsed, would fail this test because it undermines rather than sustains the narrative unity and tradition-based goods that genuine virtue requires.

MacIntyre’s diagnosis of modernity and the call for community 🔗

MacIntyre’s account of virtue relativity is not merely an academic philosophical position; it carries a sharp political diagnosis. He argues that modern Western societies are in a condition analogous to a civilizational breakdown, where the moral language still circulates but has been severed from the practices and traditions that gave it substance. After Virtue famously ends by suggesting that what is needed is not a political revolution but something more fundamental – the construction of local communities in which the virtues can be practiced and transmitted, much as Benedictine monasteries preserved intellectual and moral life during the decline of Rome.

This conclusion has been criticized as vague and even nostalgic. But MacIntyre’s deeper point is clear: without communities oriented toward shared goods, the very concept of virtue becomes incoherent. The relativity of virtues, in his view, is not a problem to be solved by finding a universal formula – it is a reminder that moral life is always lived somewhere specific, among particular people, within a particular history.

MacIntyre’s place in contemporary ethics 🔗

MacIntyre’s work sparked what the EBSCO Research summary of After Virtue describes as a new and sustained interest in the virtue tradition from the early 1980s onward. His influence is felt in fields as diverse as medical ethics, business ethics, political philosophy, and theology. The debate he opened – about whether moral standards can transcend their cultural origins, and what role community plays in the formation of character – remains very much alive. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy emphasizes, the challenge of cultural relativity is one that all versions of virtue ethics must reckon with, and it is MacIntyre who put that challenge most forcefully on the philosophical agenda.

MacIntyre does not offer a comfortable, universal moral code. Instead, he asks us to take seriously the idea that our moral lives are shaped by where we come from, who we are with, and what we are collectively trying to achieve – and that this is not a weakness of ethics, but its very condition of possibility.

What do you think? If virtues are genuinely shaped by the communities and traditions we belong to, does that make it possible – or impossible – to hold another culture morally accountable for its practices? And in an increasingly globalized world where traditional communities are weakening, where do we look for the shared standards of excellence that MacIntyre argues are essential to virtue?

References

1. https://iep.utm.edu/mac-over/
2. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/literature-and-writing/after-virtue-alasdair-macintyre
3. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-virtue/
4. https://iep.utm.edu/p-macint/
5. https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-virtues-of-alasdair-macintyre/
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Virtue
7. https://www.bu.edu/cpt/resources/book-reviews/after-virtue-by-alasdair-macintyre/