Aristotle or Nietzsche?

The death of Alasdair MacIntyre last week marks the end of one of the most towering philosophical voices of the last century—a thinker whose influence on contemporary ethics, politics, and moral reasoning cannot be overstated.

As an evangelical Christian and ethics professor, I found MacIntyre to be one of those rare interlocutors whose clarity of vision and intellectual rigor demanded attention and engagement. I have quoted him in my books and writings several times. His commitments were sometimes idiosyncratic and not easily categorized by today’s political and theological labels. Philosopher Robert P. George said on X: “A striking thing about Professor MacIntyre was that he was impossible to classify ideologically. Was he a progressive? Not really. Was he a conservative? No. A centrist? Not that either. He was sui generis.” MacIntyre’s diagnoses of modernity and its moral incoherence resonate deeply with those of us committed to biblical truth in an age of moral and ideological fragmentation.

MacIntyre’s most enduring contribution,  After Virtue  (1981), diagnosed the modern moral condition with prophetic-level precision. He argued that contemporary moral discourse is in ruins—not because we lack passion or principle, but because we lack a shared framework for moral reasoning. We still use moral words—rights, justice, duty—but we’ve hollowed them out, detached them from any coherent vision of the good, the telos of human life. In other words, we are emotivists posing as rational moral agents.

In this sense, MacIntyre was not merely describing the decline of virtue ethics; he was exposing the moral schizophrenia of the West. We parade around with the language of moral seriousness while having long since lost the metaphysical and teleological commitments that once gave that language its meaning. In his now-famous metaphor, we are like barbarians using the ruins of a civilization we no longer understand: Conservatives and progressives alike can invoke “justice” and have stark differences in what that term means. MacIntyre saw so clearly that ethics reduces to two options: Aristotle or Nietzsche. What he meant by casting ethics as a competition between those two is that ethics can be purpose-driven or self-driven. We can understand that there are natural ends and purposes inscribed into the facts of our existence that we must search after, or we can insist upon denying any universal reality and treat ethics as a contest of wills.

For evangelical ethics, this is more than an academic observation—it’s a clarion call. We inhabit this world. We teach in its institutions, raise our children in its schools, and preach the gospel in its public square. And we do so in a culture that, as MacIntyre warned, can no longer reason together about shared ends, because we no longer believe that human life has any given ends. Instead, the self is sovereign, and morality is reduced to subjective preferences masked by procedural neutrality. In the wreckage of intractable moral conflict, how we order society as a political project becomes rife for deep conflict since society no longer shares any unified moral horizon. In this situation, as MacIntyre famously said, “Modern politics is civil war carried on by other means.” Macintyre’s axiom has proven true time and time again. The pitched battles of today’s political landscape are not disputes over tax policy or speed limits. Instead, they are dueling battles between how human beings ought to self-conceptualize themselves and what the most basic arrangements of society are. Seen through this light, MacIntyre told the proponents of liberal democracy that its thin moral commitments as a society could not last forever.

What MacIntyre offered was not simply nostalgia for Aristotle or Aquinas, but a reminder that moral reasoning is impossible apart from traditions—thick, substantive moral traditions rooted in a vision of the good life and a telos for human beings. His was a profoundly counter-modern insight: reason is not neutral, and there is no such thing as a “view from nowhere.” Moral formation and discernment occur within communities, liturgies, and practices that shape our affections, our loyalties, and our conception of the good.

Evangelicals, especially those working to build a public theology, should see in MacIntyre a kindred spirit—even if a complicated one. His critique of Enlightenment rationalism, his recovery of virtue, and his insistence that we cannot separate ethics from the narratives that form us all resonate with our conviction that man is made for worship and virtue, that life has a God-ordained shape, and that moral knowledge is never merely a matter of technique but of wisdom, formation, and humility. Even those of us who are indebted to traditions like natural law theory and argue that God’s moral law resides in every human heart must not shy away from admitting that MacIntyre’s central thesis is correct: It is the Christian tradition that has most fulsomely articulated natural law theory, even if we think its implications fan out to the rest of humanity more broadly.

MacIntyre’s late-in-life conversion to Catholicism also testifies to his deep hunger for a moral community rooted in a coherent metaphysical tradition. Though Protestants and Catholics may debate the ecclesial conclusions he drew, the underlying concern is one we share: modernity has left us morally homeless. The recovery of moral sanity must involve a recovery of teleology, of tradition, and of community.

In the end, MacIntyre mattered—and still matters—because he told the truth. He told the truth about our confusion, our decadence, and our drift. He may not have provided a detailed playbook in what it would take to recover that vision practically or adequately named progressivism as a bitter enemy to his vision for moral flourishing. Still, he also pointed, however imperfectly, to the possibility of another way: a community grounded in virtue, shaped by narrative, and oriented toward ends that are not of our own invention.

In our chaotic and collapsing moral order, Christians would do well to heed MacIntyre’s warning and rise to his challenge. If the West is indeed at the end of a moral tradition, then our calling as the church is to be the kind of community, the type that MacIntyre envisioned, where the seeds of a better one are kept alive—not by power or popularity, but by faithful witness and moral clarity.

Very, very few philosophers will be studied 200 years from now. MacIntyre will be. If, someday in the future, the West regains a morally coherent footing, it will be because MacIntyre and voices like him were prophets speaking from secularism’s ruins.