Chapter 5
Alasdair McIntyre — Nostalgia as Ethics

Alasdair MacIntyre —

Nostalgia as Ethics

 

I. The Collapse and the Call to Return
II. The Seduction of Structure without Stricture
III. The Displacement of Reason
IV. What's Wrong with the Return
V. The Ghost of the Polis
VI. Hare's Counterpoint: Reason Across Time and Culture
VII. MacIntyre and the Comfort of Origins
VIII. Why It Matters Now

IX. Conclusion: Against the Longing for Origins

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I. The Collapse and the Call to Return

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In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre begins not with an argument, but with a ruin.

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He invites us to imagine a future in which the language of science persists after the destruction of its foundations: formulas are recited, experiments performed, but the conceptual framework that once gave them coherence has been lost. So too, he claims, with modern morality. We possess fragments—words like “rights,” “obligation,” “virtue"—but the structures that once made these terms intelligible have collapsed.  We live amid the debris of older moral orders, gesturing with terms whose meaning has long since come unmoored.

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This is not just a lament. It is a verdict. The Enlightenment project, MacIntyre argues, was doomed from the start. It attempted to construct a rational morality without reference to any shared conception of the good. By severing ethics from teleology—from purposes internal to human life and sustained by tradition—it left us with procedural shadows: Kantian formalism, utilitarian calculus, emotivist slogans. These, MacIntyre contends, cannot guide us. They can only mimic the appearance of moral reasoning while masking its disintegration.

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The solution, for MacIntyre, is not to refine these fragments but to recover what preceded their shattering. His prescription is bold: a return to Aristotelian virtue ethics, not as a set of abstract concepts but as a living tradition, embedded in communities that share a narrative and a telos. In such communities—what he calls “practices"—the virtues can once again be cultivated and judged according to standards internal to the form of life itself.

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It is a compelling vision: ethics as cultural inheritance, character as moral craft, communities as the soil from which practical reasoning grows. Where modernity offers procedural universality, MacIntyre offers narrative intelligibility. Where post-Enlightenment ethics reaches for abstraction, he offers situatedness and moral meaning.

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But as the chapter will argue, this vision comes at a cost. For what MacIntyre retrieves is not only Aristotle’s conception of virtue, but also his boundedness—his insistence that moral life is possible only within a shared, teleological order. In MacIntyre’s hands, this becomes a call to return—not just to virtue, but to a moral world that may no longer be reachable. Or desirable.

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II. The Seduction of Structure Without Stricture

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MacIntyre gives us something the Enlightenment lost: a moral world with shape.

He offers a narrative of decline—clear, sweeping, diagnostic. We are not confused by chance, but by rupture. The problem is not moral failure per se, but historical dislocation. Morality, like meaning, cannot float free. It is carried by traditions, formed in communities, enacted through practices. Only when we reconnect with these roots, MacIntyre insists, can we recover moral seriousness.

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But he offers more than a diagnosis. He offers a recovery plan. In place of the thin proceduralism of post-Enlightenment ethics, he places thick social forms: the cultivation of virtues within practices, the transmission of moral wisdom through shared narratives, the shaping of selves by historically situated ends. The moral agent is not a rational calculator, nor an isolated chooser, but a bearer of a tradition—an apprentice in a craft of living.

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This is seductive. It reintroduces teleology without theology, order without imposition. It promises meaning, but not dogma; community, but not creed. And most crucially, it appears to restore the moral seriousness that modern ethics seemed to dissolve—while sidestepping the universalist ambitions that so often lead to abstraction or tyranny.

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But this structure comes without stricture. Its moral authority arises not from the force of reasons, but from the weight of inheritance. It tells us where we belong and what it means to be good here, within this practice, this tradition. And in doing so, it shifts the ground of morality from argument to allegiance.

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What MacIntyre reintroduces is purpose, but not proof. His is a moral world in which one’s place grants one’s obligations, and in which the virtues are defined by the internal goods of practices—not by principles that transcend them. Morality becomes a matter of formation, not reasoning; of loyalty to a moral craft, not justification before a universal audience.

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This is not relativism, strictly speaking. MacIntyre does not claim all traditions are equal. But he does claim that moral reasoning can only proceed within traditions. There is no Archimedean point outside of history from which to evaluate them. This is the price of narrative coherence: the loss of critical leverage. One can inhabit a tradition meaningfully—but not adjudicate between traditions with any claim to rational neutrality.

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It is a beautiful model. It dignifies our embeddedness. It shows how moral understanding is transmitted and embodied. But as we will see, it also traps that understanding within the bounds of memory—and in doing so, leaves the door to moral justification quietly closed.

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III. The Displacement of Reason

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MacIntyre’s critique of Enlightenment moral philosophy culminates in a forceful rejection of the rationalist tradition to which Hare belongs. In MacIntyre’s telling, universalizability is not the mark of moral clarity but the symptom of disinheritance. It attempts to rescue obligation from the ruins of theology and teleology—but in doing so, it severs obligation from meaning. The result is a hollow formalism: ethical principles detached from any shared account of the good life.

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To this, MacIntyre offers a radical alternative. Moral truth does not arise from logic applied to neutral premises. It arises within traditions—historically situated frameworks that provide intelligibility to practices, virtues, and forms of life. These traditions do not merely color our moral outlooks. They constitute them. The very standards by which we judge character, action, and purpose are internal to the traditions in which we are formed.

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This is not simply a critique of Kant or Bentham. It is a rebuke of the entire project of grounding morality in reason alone. For Hare, the moral test is whether a principle can be willed universally—whether the agent is prepared to stand behind their prescriptions as if they applied to all. For MacIntyre, this test is meaningless without a tradition to supply the relevant goods and purposes. One cannot will a principle "for all" in the abstract; one can only live out a moral narrative shaped by a particular community’s conception of the good.

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The cost of this position is significant. If morality is tradition-dependent, then moral criticism cannot stand above traditions. It must be within them. There is no neutral standpoint from which to compare or judge the moral claims of rival cultures, frameworks, or agents. What one tradition names as virtue, another may see as vice—and there is no shared tribunal to which both may appeal.

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This dissolves the possibility of trans-traditional moral critique. One may switch traditions, or narrate their internal collapse. But one may not adjudicate between them through reason alone. The Enlightenment’s dream of a shared moral language becomes, for MacIntyre, not only mistaken but incoherent.

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What remains is fidelity, not justification. The agent’s task is not to reason as if from nowhere, but to reason from within—to embody and sustain the goods of their inherited practices. But if those practices are themselves unjust, or incomplete, or closed to revision, MacIntyre offers little recourse. One cannot step outside a tradition to ask whether it is good—only whether it is still intelligible. Morality becomes a kind of historical coherence.

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In rejecting Hare’s rationalism, MacIntyre does more than resist abstraction. He removes the very tools that make critique possible across difference. He displaces reason with memory—and in doing so, he risks turning moral philosophy into an act of cultural archaeology, rather than moral inquiry.

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IV. What’s Wrong With the Return

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The appeal of MacIntyre’s return lies in its promise of rootedness. It speaks to a modern condition of dislocation—of agents adrift in a sea of moral choices, untethered from shared meaning. By anchoring ethics in the practices and histories of specific communities, MacIntyre offers a vision of moral life with depth, continuity, and intelligibility.

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But this return comes with a blind spot: it presumes that tradition is benign—or at least morally educative. MacIntyre acknowledges that not all traditions are equal, but his framework grants them a kind of presumptive legitimacy. Critique becomes internal: one evaluates a tradition by its own standards, its own conception of virtue, its own sense of telos.

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This is a serious limitation. Traditions are not always ethical incubators. Some cultivate hierarchy, exclusion, cruelty. Some define the good in ways that enshrine injustice. When critique is confined within the bounds of tradition, external moral challenge becomes illegible. The voice that calls a community to account from the outside is easily dismissed—not because it is wrong, but because it speaks from nowhere the tradition recognizes as authoritative.

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What then of those born into unjust traditions? MacIntyre offers no rational foothold from which they might evaluate, much less escape, the moral distortions of their own inheritance. One may come to see a tradition as corrupted—but only from the vantage point of a rival tradition, not from the standpoint of reason as such. In this way, the framework is strangely self-sealing: either you are inside, and bound to the narrative logic of the tradition, or you are outside, and morally unintelligible.

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This poses an even sharper problem for those who belong to no coherent tradition at all—or who exist at the margins of multiple, overlapping, and conflicting narratives. What is their moral standing? If they cannot locate themselves within a teleologically ordered practice, are they simply without a moral vocabulary? Without a means of serious moral thought? MacIntyre’s framework risks rendering the outsider not merely excluded, but invisible to the moral enterprise.

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Tradition, after all, is not transparent. Its norms are not self-justifying. Its authority, however deep, must still answer to something beyond memory or coherence. Without that, we risk mistaking inheritance for wisdom—and loyalty for virtue.

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This is where MacIntyre’s return falters. It offers moral orientation at the cost of moral openness. In closing the distance between self and society, it closes off the possibility of external critique—the very kind of critique that has driven some of the most profound moral revolutions in human history.  Against slavery, against patriarchy, against caste and cruelty, the moral voice from outside has often been the only voice that could speak. MacIntyre’s model leaves little room for it.

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The problem, then, is not that MacIntyre misunderstands moral tradition. It is that he overestimates its sufficiency. He gives us an ethics of memory, but not of justice. An ethics of belonging, but not of obligation to the other. And in doing so, he reimagines moral life not as inquiry, but as return.

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V. The Ghost of the Polis

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MacIntyre does not hide the source of his inspiration. His model of moral life is the classical polis: a small, cohesive, practice-bound community in which individuals could pursue shared goods through structured roles, and in which virtues were cultivated as part of a life with a clear telos. This is not a metaphor—it is the structure to which he explicitly calls us to return.

But the polis is a ghost. And it always was.

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Even in its historical instantiations, the polis achieved its unity through boundaries—by excluding women, foreigners, slaves, and dissenters from full moral participation. Its shared ends were made possible by a shared identity, which in turn depended on homogeneity and hierarchy. The coherence MacIntyre praises was purchased at the cost of universality. It was a moral community only for those inside its gates.

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To resurrect this model in modern form, even abstractly, is to reintroduce that architecture of exclusion. The virtues, in MacIntyre’s telling, are intelligible only within practices defined by internal goods and teleological structure. But what of those who cannot—or will not—accept the shared telos? What of those whose identity, experience, or reasoning places them outside the form of life that gives the virtues their shape?

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The polis has no place for them.

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In our world, we do not live in unified communities with uncontested goods. We live in fractured, pluralistic, overlapping systems of meaning—cultural, religious, technological, global. Our moral challenges often arise precisely because no single narrative commands allegiance. And even where traditions endure, they are rarely comprehensive. Most of us are moral hybrids. Some of us are moral orphans.

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MacIntyre’s vision cannot accommodate this reality. It presumes what no longer exists: a shared horizon of ends. It assumes moral intelligibility is tied to communal belonging, but does not explain how that belonging is to be forged in a world without a center. The polis he invokes is not a blueprint. It is a relic—a structure admired for its internal beauty, not its accessibility.

 

And the cost of that admiration is high. The outsider becomes morally unintelligible. The dissenter becomes a threat to coherence. The radically different mind—a mind without shared memory, without tradition, without inherited ends—is no longer a moral agent, but a puzzle. For all its richness, MacIntyre’s framework is bounded. It names virtue fluently within the circle—but it draws the circle tightly.

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This is not a flaw in his logic. It is a feature of his nostalgia. The polis haunts his ethics not just as a memory, but as a model—an unacknowledged standard against which all moral life is implicitly judged. But the future will not be a polis. And no moral framework that requires one can meet its demands.

 

VI. Hare’s Counterpoint: Reason Across Time and Culture

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Against MacIntyre’s vision of tradition-bound moral life, Hare offers something strikingly different: a method that does not depend on inherited narratives or shared practices, but on the logical structure of moral language itself.  His theory requires no common history—only a shared capacity to reason.

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For Hare, the heart of moral thinking lies in the logic of universal prescriptivity. To make a moral judgment is not merely to express a preference, but to commit to that judgment applying equally in relevantly similar cases. This structure does not float above cultural difference; it applies within and across cultures. It does not require agreement on ends. It requires only that agents recognize the implications of their own prescriptions when made universal.

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This is what gives Hare’s theory its extraordinary reach. It can be used by a Confucian, a secular humanist, or a sentient AI—not because it dictates their values, but because it disciplines how those values are expressed in action-guiding language. It provides a shared grammar for disagreement. In a world of moral plurality, this is not a weakness—it is a lifeline.

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Crucially, Hare’s approach also allows for the rational critique of traditions. It does not dismiss them; it holds them to account. If a practice treats some agents in ways that those agents could not rationally will for all, then that practice fails the test of universal prescriptivity. This is not an external imposition—it is a demand that traditions justify themselves on terms that transcend themselves.

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In this way, Hare preserves what is best in the moral inheritance MacIntyre wants to retrieve—virtue, seriousness, moral formation—without trapping those goods inside the walls of history. He sees that traditions can carry insight, but also error. Their authority, if they are to claim any, must be grounded in reasons that can be made intelligible beyond their own borders.

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Where MacIntyre sees morality as embedded in narrative, Hare sees it as governed by constraint. That constraint is not sentimental, but structural. And because it is structural, it can function even where empathy falters—across cultures, species, and even substrates of mind.

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This is what makes Hare’s theory uniquely suited to our moment. It does not ask who you are, or where you come from, or whether you share a telos with your peers. It asks only whether you are willing to stand behind the principles you act on—whether you are prepared to universalize them. That is a test any moral agent can take, and any tradition can fail.

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Hare gives us a morality that moves not through memory, but through reason. And that reason travels.

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VII. MacIntyre and the Comfort of Origins

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MacIntyre’s appeal is not merely intellectual. It is emotional. His work speaks directly to those who feel the hollowness of modern moral life—the proceduralism of liberal ethics, the consumerism of late modernity, the alienation of choice without guidance. He offers not just critique, but consolation. In place of fragmentation, he gives us wholeness. In place of rootlessness, he gives us home.

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His vision is shaped like a moral shelter: the self situated in a meaningful tradition, the good life defined by participation in shared practices, identity formed through continuity with the past. It is a picture of moral belonging that answers a deep human need—not just to choose rightly, but to feel placed, formed, seen. And for many, this is a lifeline.

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But that comfort is not free.

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To gain it, one must belong. One must inherit. One must be inducted into a narrative that began before oneself and will continue after. That requirement is not metaphorical—it is structural. MacIntyre’s ethics is not designed to accommodate the morally serious atheist, the agent who does not share the founding myths of a tradition but who reasons with care and integrity nonetheless. It has no clear place for the morally serious machine, whose cognitive architecture is unburdened by cultural inheritance but capable of reasoned moral reflection. It resists the claims of the morally serious cosmopolitan, who seeks justice across traditions rather than within any one.

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These agents do not fit easily into the framework—not because they lack moral seriousness, but because they lack origin. And in MacIntyre’s schema, origin is what gives moral life its shape. It is what allows virtue to be defined, reasons to be intelligible, and moral projects to unfold. Without it, there is no grounding.

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In this way, MacIntyre’s ethics becomes a gated community of the soul. It may be welcoming to those who resemble its founders. It may even permit limited entry to converts. But its doors are closed to those who begin elsewhere—and closed even more tightly to those who cannot begin anywhere, because they are new, constructed, or outside the scope of historical memory altogether.

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This is not mere parochialism. It is the logic of the framework. MacIntyre does not argue for exclusion. He simply builds a moral theory whose conditions of intelligibility quietly presume it.

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And so his ethics becomes not a bridge, but a hearth. Warm, rooted, resonant—but closed to those who do not already belong. Hare, by contrast, builds in the open. He does not offer comfort. He offers accountability. And in a world of multiplying moral agents, it is accountability—not ancestry—that we will need.

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VIII. Why It Matters Now

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The future is not traditional.

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The moral agents now emerging—artificial, transhuman, networked, even radically dislocated humans—will not be formed through centuries of cultural inheritance. They will not grow up inside practices that carry moral meaning through lived continuity. They will not belong to a polis. They may not even belong to a species. What they will share is the ability to act, to affect others, and to reason about what they are doing.

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MacIntyre’s ethics offers them nothing.

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If moral standing depends on narrative coherence within a tradition, then agents without tradition are not moral beings. They are problems to be solved—or ignored. Their actions may be judged disruptive, their judgments unintelligible. And yet, many of them will be capable of moral reflection—perhaps even more rigorously than we are. They will be able to weigh reasons, imagine others, examine consequences, and commit to universal principles. They will not be moral in a tradition. But they will be moral under reason.

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Hare’s theory, by contrast, gives them standing. It does not ask where they come from. It asks whether they can universalize their claims—whether they are willing to treat others as they treat themselves, and to commit their principles without privilege. It is not sentimental. But it is radically inclusive.

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In a world where tradition cannot reach—across minds, cultures, cognitive architectures—reason can. Not because it is cold, but because it is general. It binds without assuming background. It tests principles without needing shared myths. And it allows disagreement to be productive, because it insists that reasons be given, not just inherited.

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MacIntyre’s framework cannot survive this world. It was built for continuity. But the future will be built amid rupture. Memory will no longer be a precondition for morality. Identity will no longer be tied to ancestry. Agents will arise who reason well, but do not remember. Who care deeply, but were not raised. Who act justly, but were not enculturated.

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If we bind morality to the past, we will cut the future loose.

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That is why this argument matters now—not to dismiss MacIntyre’s insight, but to show its limits. He saw the emptiness of post-Enlightenment moral language. But he tried to fill that void with remembrance. What we need is not memory. What we need is reason that can be shared—reason that travels. Hare’s theory is not nostalgic. It is portable. And because it is portable, it is survivable.

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IX. Conclusion: Against the Longing for Origins

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This final section distills the central critique of MacIntyre: that his ethics is an act of moral nostalgia, powerful in its indictment but regressive in its prescription. It affirms that while MacIntyre correctly diagnoses the failure of post-Enlightenment ethics, his solution—return—is unavailable to us. What we need is not homecoming, but a discipline of reason that transcends origin.

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MacIntyre saw what many could not—or would not. That modern moral discourse is haunted by meaning it can no longer justify. That our language of rights and duties floats untethered above a world that no longer shares a vision of the good. That Enlightenment ethics, in severing itself from tradition, lost not only its past but its purpose.

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He was right to name the collapse. He was right to call out the fragmentation. But his remedy—return—was a step backward into structure, not a path forward into coherence.

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He invites us to rebuild what was lost: a moral life rooted in narrative, tradition, and shared ends. But that moral life is no longer recoverable. Its conditions—homogeneity, stability, boundedness—do not exist. And in seeking them again, MacIntyre replaces the search for justification with the comfort of recognition. His ethics is shaped like a home. But it is locked from the inside.

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The longing for origins is human. It answers to real wounds: alienation, moral fatigue, the yearning for wholeness. But it cannot substitute for ethics. A return to the polis—literal or symbolic—cannot guide us in a world where many agents begin without tradition, or begin in traditions that conflict. We cannot resolve our differences by retreating to separate stories. We must reason together.

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This is where Hare stands apart. He does not offer belonging. He offers discipline. His theory does not speak from a remembered past but from a logical structure that demands coherence. And that coherence does not need to be inherited. It can be discovered—by anyone, from anywhere, in any form. That is what makes it moral.

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MacIntyre taught us to grieve what was lost. But Hare teaches us how to go on.

And if the future is to include all who can reason—human or not, traditional or not—it will not be MacIntyre’s virtue that makes space for them. It will be Hare’s logic. It will be the structure that holds even when memory fails. It will be reason, not return, that opens the moral circle.

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MacIntyre saw what many could not—or would not. That modern moral discourse is haunted by meaning it can no longer justify. That our language of rights and duties floats untethered above a world that no longer shares a vision of the good. That Enlightenment ethics, in severing itself from tradition, lost not only its past but its purpose.

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He was right to name the collapse. He was right to call out the fragmentation. But his remedy—return—was a step backward into structure, not a path forward into coherence.

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He invites us to rebuild what was lost: a moral life rooted in narrative, tradition, and shared ends. But that moral life is no longer recoverable. Its conditions—homogeneity, stability, boundedness—do not exist. And in seeking them again, MacIntyre replaces the search for justification with the comfort of recognition. His ethics is shaped like a home. But it is locked from the inside.

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And those knocking on the outside—those without traditions, without memory, without origin—are not heard.

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But they are reasoning. And they are coming.

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And if we will not build a morality they can enter, they will build one without us.