Virtue after God: Theology in Alasdair Macintyre's secular moral theory

This dissertation examines a segment of Alasdair MacIntyre's intellectual biography by taking on his variegated engagement with Christian theology over several decades from Marxism: An Interpretation (1953) - MacIntyre's first book, written when he was just twenty-three - up to and including his major philosophical contribution in After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1981). "Virtue After God: Theology in Alasdair MacIntyre's Secular Moral Theory" addresses a deficiency in the now vast scholarly literature on MacIntyre by offering a comprehensive interpretation of his early religious thought and its integral but mostly unacknowledged contribution to the development of the After Virtue project itself. My overarching purpose, then, is to tell the involved philosophical story of how MacIntyre got from the Marxist political theology powerfully expressed in Marxism: An Interpretation to the secular moral philosophy of After Virtue.;In addition, this work serves the further constructive purpose of retrieving After Virtue as a work of secular Aristotelianism in contrast to the theistic ethical program MacIntyre developed after becoming a Thomist and converting to Catholicism and which has tended to overshadow the importance of MacIntyre's earlier critique of theology for gaining a rounded appreciation of his major work. I ask the question: What does After Virtue have to offer those of us who, dissatisfied with liberal moral and political theory and impressed by MacIntyre's suggestion that a solution to contemporary conundrums lies (at least in part) in a recovery of antique notions of virtue and the good life, nonetheless aspire to an alternative way of life and moral theory that does not presuppose or return us to God?;MacIntyre rarely refers to his own prior publications in the writings I am looking at, and the account of how and why he progressively modified his religious views in the ways I'm claiming he did is therefore generally based on my own interpretation rather than MacIntyre's expressed self-understanding. I arrive at my account of the development of MacIntyre's thinking about religion and ethics via a close analysis of the most significant works dealing with God and Christianity that he published up through 1981. My reading of MacIntyre is also routinely critical, and I try to arrive at nuanced distinctions between what he has and has not achieved in one or another work or argument.;Although lacking the same dialectical poise and unity of vision characteristic of his mature work, MacIntyre's pre-After Virtue writings on Christianity do comprise part of one philosophical prodigy's virtuoso performance as he worked his way through the great trends of mid-twentieth century thought and the history of Western philosophy towards those singular views through which he would alter the landscape of contemporary philosophical ethics.;The texts by MacIntyre that I discuss in greatest depth are: Marxism: An Interpretation, "The Logical Status of Religious Belief" (1957), Difficulties in Christian Belief (1959), "Is Understanding Religion Compatible with Believing?" (1964), Secularization and Moral Change (1967), Marxism and Christianity (1968), The Religious Significance of Atheism (1969), "Can Medicine Dispense with a Theological Perspective on Human Nature?" (1977), and After Virtue. For my purposes, these pieces may be grouped into three categories. First, there are the works from the fifties in which MacIntyre tried to assemble a socially critical Christian philosophy by modifying Marx's moral, social, and political teaching to make it harmonious with an updated version of Christian theology in which Karl's Barth's radical faith in divine revelation was fitted into Wittgenstein's understanding of religion as a distinct form of life. Second, there are the skeptical writings from the sixties and seventies in which MacIntyre criticizes all the major strains of contemporary Christian theology as intellectually bankrupt and practically ineffective and seeks to articulate a socially critical philosophy that, while staying fairly close to Marxism, points towards a more adequate proposal that would return us to the Christian content of Marx's humanism while simultaneously going beyond Marx in the direction of an even more secular form of rationality. Third, in After Virtue, MacIntyre finally propounds a version of ethical Aristotelianism that is not only independent of theistic metaphysical predicates but also in tension with theological assumptions about the world as a cosmos that he thinks have tended to obscure the tragic reality of life in the Western tradition of the virtues. The theological idea of the coming kingdom still expressed in Marxism's confidence in the progressive direction of history must give way to the reality of earthly life, the certainties of faith and reason to the contingency and perpetual revisability of human theory and practice. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).