“A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.”

— Aimé Césaire. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972, p. 31.

Why should an ordinary person, with no taste for philosophy and no patience for academic quarrels, care about a Scottish philosopher who spent his life writing dense books about virtue and tradition? Because the world we now inhabit — a world of endless wars, of children starved in Gaza, of politicians mouthing abstractions while doing nothing — is the very world he foresaw. Alasdair MacIntyre gave us not slogans but a way of naming the crisis: the collapse of our moral bearings, the hollowing out of words like “justice” and “rights” until they are uttered with solemnity in public halls and betrayed in practice the very next day. He helps us see why our politics has become shrill and sterile, why our institutions fail, why every war is justified and every genocide denied.

This is the work of the humanities at their best: to provide not technical skills or marketable credentials but the language through which we can describe our condition. Without such a vocabulary, we drift, repeating empty formulas while violence multiplies. But with it, we can recognise the forms of complicity around us, and perhaps even imagine how to live otherwise. MacIntyre warned that we are producing a world run by managers, therapists, and bureaucrats — people trained to optimise, to soothe, to regulate — but not to ask whether what we are doing is good. Our universities, now obsessed with “skills-based agendas,” are factories for this very order: efficient, marketable, morally hollow. Against this tide, the humanities still matter, because they keep alive the words and traditions that allow us to name injustice when it appears, and to resist it.

The genocide in Gaza is not an aberration. It is a revelation. To call it an anomaly is to falsify its genealogy. What unfolds before us—bombs falling on children, hospitals reduced to rubble, humanitarian pleas drowned in diplomatic euphemism—arises not from a sudden breakdown but from a global order where rights are proclaimed but rarely embodied, where international law is invoked but seldom enforced, where morality survives only as fragments of a lost whole. Statesmen recite their fidelity to “norms” and “procedures,” even as their governments supply weapons. The betrayal is not only political but linguistic: the very words by which we name justice—rights, dignity, law—have become bankrupt.

It was precisely this condition that MacIntyre, who died on 21 May 2025 at the age of ninety-six, diagnosed with prophetic force. When After Virtue appeared in 1981, it unsettled the habits of philosophy and reconfigured the coordinates of moral debate. He opened with a parable: imagine a civilisation in which the sciences have been destroyed and only fragments of their vocabulary survive. People still speak of “neutrons” and “experiments,” but the practices that once gave those words coherence are gone (MacIntyre, 1981, pp. 1–2). This, he argued, is the state of modern moral discourse. We invoke justice, rights, autonomy—but as relics of lost traditions. The concepts remain, but the practices and forms of life that once gave them meaning have disintegrated. To read him today, in the shadow of Gaza, is to realise that his parable has come true.

The Ruins of Modern Morality

MacIntyre’s wager was stark: “There are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and unicorns” (After Virtue, 1981, p. 69). By this, he did not mean to sneer at rights but to reveal their fragility. Once uprooted from the moral worlds that had given them coherence—ancient philosophy, medieval theology—rights-talk becomes little more than assertion. We shout “human rights!” but no longer share the practices and traditions that would make those claims binding.

The world’s response to Gaza exemplifies this. Human rights are declared universal, yet the very states that champion them prove incapable—or unwilling—to make them real. Declarations pile up, but bombs continue to fall.

What underlies this impotence, for MacIntyre, is the condition he called emotivism. In an emotivist culture, moral language survives but only as rhetoric. Words like “just” or “wrong” no longer appeal to shared criteria; they function as masked expressions of preference or will. When one leader declares that bombing refugee camps is “self-defence” and another calls it “genocide,” they are not disagreeing within a common framework of reasoning — they are asserting rival preferences with no shared measure of adjudication. That is why public disputes feel endless: we still use the old moral vocabulary, but it has lost the practices that once made it binding. Gaza is the brutal stage on which this hollowness is laid bare.

Here, MacIntyre’s critique of liberalism also becomes sharp. Liberalism presents itself as a neutral order, allowing each individual to pursue their own ends. Yet in practice, it imposes its own vision: the primacy of the atomised chooser, detached from any common good. Politics, under liberalism, is reduced to the management of procedures — such as elections, resolutions, and bureaucratic norms — rather than the cultivation of virtue or the pursuit of shared goods. The result is a politics of paralysis. Liberal democracies issue balanced statements, abstain on votes, or speak of “processes” and “frameworks” while continuing to supply arms. Their neutrality is not impartiality but complicity. They become administrators of moral failure.

For MacIntyre, this is why modern institutions so often disappoint: they lack the substance of moral reasoning, substituting it with procedures that can never resolve real disputes. Gaza makes visible the dead end of this liberal order. Rights are recited like mantras, but no tradition sustains them. Rules are invoked, but no community enforces them. Words remain, while the reality to which they once pointed lies in ruins.

A Restless Pilgrim

To understand why MacIntyre’s words still cut so sharply, one must recall his restless journey. Born in Glasgow in 1929, he grew up amid the turbulence of interwar Europe and the moral reckonings of the postwar years. He began as a Marxist activist, convinced that the socialist movement could provide both justice and meaning. His early writings wrestled with Marx, Trotsky, and the promise of a revolutionary politics. Yet he quickly saw that Marxism, as practised in the 20th century, failed to answer fundamental moral questions: what kind of human life is good, and what virtues must be cultivated to sustain it?

Meanwhile, he trained in analytic philosophy, the reigning mode of thought in the English-speaking world. Its virtues were precision and clarity, its vices sterility and abstraction. MacIntyre observed that while analytic philosophers could dissect arguments with surgical precision, they often lacked historical context and moral urgency. He grew impatient with puzzles that felt bloodless in the face of real human suffering.

By the 1970s, he was caught between ruins. Marxism had collapsed into sectarian squabbles. Liberalism offered only procedural neutrality, incapable of inspiring loyalty. Analytic philosophy had shrunk into technical scholasticism. Out of this despair came After Virtue, a work that fused philosophy with intellectual history to craft a sweeping indictment of modern moral culture.

The Enlightenment, he argued, had attempted the impossible: to preserve moral rules while discarding the teleological framework—Aristotle’s account of human flourishing—that had once given them coherence. Kant, Hume, Bentham: each tried to build a new foundation for morality on reason or sentiment alone, and each failed. What remained were fragments. After Virtue called readers to confront the wreckage and to imagine once again how the virtues might guide a life within communities bound by shared goods.

Tradition as Living Argument

If After Virtue was diagnosis, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) was the prognosis. There, MacIntyre gave his most nuanced account of tradition. He defined it not as a museum of customs, nor the dead weight of the past, but as an argument extended through time. Traditions, he wrote, are “conflicts of interpretation” that sustain rationality by carrying debate across generations. They are living conversations in which moral claims are tested, contested, and renewed.

This idea casts Gaza in tragic relief. What we see there is not simply the clash of interests but the collision of rival traditions with no common bearings. Liberal proceduralism speaks in the idiom of universal law, issuing reports and resolutions that reflect its principles. Zionist settler-colonialism speaks in the idiom of destiny and security, framing occupation as permanence. Palestinian liberation speaks in the idiom of return and dignity, of dispossession remembered and justice demanded. These orientations collide without convergence. Appeals to justice pass one another without ever meeting.

MacIntyre’s point was not that such conflicts are meaningless but that they can only be judged within the context of traditions capable of sustaining coherent accounts of goods and virtues. Without that, disputes degenerate into bare assertion. Gaza exemplifies this degeneration: one side calls slaughter “self-defence,” another calls it “genocide,” and international institutions issue statements of “concern” that alter nothing.

This failure of moral discourse was dramatised in Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990). Here, MacIntyre described three voices that shape our age. The first was what he called an encyclopaedia: the Enlightenment dream of universal knowledge presented as timeless fact. This is the voice of UN resolutions, NGO reports, and humanitarian declarations. It insists that children have rights, that hospitals must not be bombed, and that civilians must be protected. Yet these pronouncements float free of the practices that might give them binding power. They resemble rules written in stone but enforced by no one.

The second voice was genealogy, the Nietzschean habit of unmasking. Genealogy unmasks the first voice as hypocrisy, exposing rights-talk and humanitarian language as instruments of empire. It reminds us that the lofty declarations are often a cover for domination.

Both voices contain truth, but neither is entirely satisfying. And so MacIntyre turned to a third voice: tradition. By this, he meant the reasoning that lives within historically embodied communities, where practices and virtues are sustained across time. A tradition is not a declaration nor an unmasking but a way of living that binds moral claims to shared goods.

Our world, and Gaza within it, oscillates between the first two. Encyclopaedic voices declare rights, genealogical voices expose hypocrisies, but no living tradition is there to make justice binding. Without that third voice, moral discourse collapses into either empty proclamation or cynical denunciation. Gaza becomes the scene of this oscillation, a place where words are said, unmasked, and forgotten, while the dead are buried.

The Thomist Turn

Two years after After Virtue, MacIntyre entered the Catholic Church. For some, this was betrayal; for others, consummation. What he found in Thomism was not nostalgia for medieval theology but a living inheritance. In the writings of Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle’s account of human flourishing was fused with Christian theology, producing a tradition capable of sustaining practices of virtue across ruptures.

Liberalism had offered only procedural neutrality. Marxism had collapsed under the burden of its history. Analytic philosophy had withered into scholastic puzzles. Thomism provided MacIntyre with a framework in which reason, virtue, and community could be reconciled. Traditions, he insisted, are not closed systems but open arguments, capable of renewal even in crisis. Thomism, for him, was one such renewal.

A pertinent context emerges when placing MacIntyre’s Thomist turn alongside Wael Hallaq’s Reforming Modernity (2019), where a parallel turn within Islamic thought is brought into focus. Hallaq, one of the most incisive critics of modernity, argues that Enlightenment reason and the secular academy have stripped morality of its metaphysical ground, and he turns to the Moroccan philosopher Taha Abderrahmane—perhaps the most original and rigorous Arab-Islamic thinker of the postcolonial era—to chart an alternative. In Taha’s ethical system lies both a searing critique of modernity and a daring reimagining of how life might be re-anchored beyond its Western and Islamic disfigurations, a project that aspires to a truly non-Western philosophical tradition. Read now alongside MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Talal Asad, Hallaq emerges not merely as a historian of Islamic law but as a post-secular moral philosopher, using Islam to illuminate the ethical void—and to hold a mirror to the moral poverty of the West.

Seen in the light of Gaza, the Thomist turn underscores a simple truth: only communities rooted in thick traditions of goods and virtues can resist the abstractions of empire. Without such traditions, rights become mere incantations, humanitarianism becomes mere sentiment, and politics becomes mere administration.

At the close of After Virtue, MacIntyre issued a summons: “What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained” (p. 263). This has often been dismissed as escapism, but MacIntyre was clear: this was not retreat but strategic withdrawal. The hope of moral life, he argued, lies not in statecraft or abstract ideology, but in practices that resist commodification and nurture goods that cannot be bought.

Here lies a resonance with Gaza’s dispersed solidarities. Local vigils are held worldwide. Families who light candles in refugee camps. Schools in exile that teach not only literacy but patience and dignity. Diaspora artists staging plays, writing poems, and composing music that remember moments when official histories would rather forget. These are not gestures of sentiment but practices of virtue: the cultivation of courage, solidarity, and remembrance within communities.

A farm that teaches stewardship of the land, a clinic that practices care, a workshop where skill is transmitted across generations—these are not nostalgic anachronisms but the seedbeds of resistance to managerial society. In Gaza, where infrastructures are systematically destroyed, the persistence of community kitchens, clandestine schools, and acts of mutual aid exemplifies the very resilience MacIntyre described: small practices of goods that resist commodification and sustain life.

The Manager, the Therapist, and the Bureaucrat

In Against the Self-Images of the Age (1971), MacIntyre delivered one of his most cutting observations: “What we have done is to replace the moral hero with the manager, the therapist, and the bureaucrat.” This was the great substitution. Moral courage, once rooted in wisdom and risk, was displaced by the optimisation of systems.

The manager optimises outcomes, asking not whether what is being done is good, but whether it is efficient. The therapist soothes anxieties, never questioning whether one ought to suffer for justice, only how to cope with suffering. The bureaucrat regulates procedures, ensuring they are followed regardless of whether they serve the good. Together, these figures define the moral order of modernity. No One asks whether what we are doing is just, only whether it is effective, comfortable, or procedurally correct.

And so Gaza is managed, therapised, bureaucratised. Euphemisms proliferate: “collateral damage,” “security operations,” “strategic necessity.” The language of management displaces the language of justice. The role of the therapist appears in humanitarian appeals that emphasise empathy but leave structures intact. The bureaucrat ensures the procedures of international institutions continue, reports are filed, and resolutions passed—while genocide persists. This is not neutrality. It is complicity. And in such moments, MacIntyre’s voice becomes prophetic.

MacIntyre’s late work, Dependent Rational Animals (1999), added another dimension. Human beings, he argued, are not primarily autonomous choosers but vulnerable creatures, dependent on networks of giving and receiving. The Enlightenment’s fiction of the self-sufficient individual collapses when confronted with the reality of need: childhood, disability, illness, and ageing. Virtue begins not with autonomy but with the acknowledgement of dependence.

This insight renders Gaza even more searing. The destruction of hospitals, the starvation of children, the abandonment of the elderly—these reveal the collapse of the very networks of care that make human life possible. MacIntyre’s insistence that virtues arise within practices of mutual dependence underscores what has been shattered: not only buildings but the conditions of moral life itself.

Counter-Voices: Arendt, Levi, Benjamin, Badiou

To deepen the resonance, one must hear MacIntyre alongside other voices. Arendt warned that when traditions break, judgment dissolves into banality. Levi insisted that memory itself is the last barrier against annihilation: “Consider if this is a man” (Levi, 1959, p. 17). Walter Benjamin, writing of history, reminded us that every document of civilisation is also a document of barbarism, and that the task of the living is to rescue the memory of the defeated from the triumphal march of the victors. And Alain Badiou, in his language of the “event,” tells us that inevitable ruptures demand fidelity: a refusal to return to business as usual.

Gaza, read through these lenses, is not merely a geopolitical conflict but a moral cataclysm: a rupture that reveals the void at the heart of modern morality and summons fidelity to justice beyond the ruins.

To read MacIntyre today is to pick up a sharp object and stare into a mirror. He gives us no slogans, no consolations. Instead, he issues a challenge: rebuild the moral life, or watch it die. Gaza forces the same reckoning. It is not enough to condemn genocide. We must ask what kind of moral culture allows it to happen, to persist, and to be forgotten.

MacIntyre teaches that the answer is not only political but philosophical. Our institutions fail because our moral traditions have failed. In such a vacuum, moral claims are like dripped paint on a disintegrating wall—visible, but void. Around us lie the ruins: fragments of justice, fragments of law, fragments of morality.

His closing words in After Virtue still haunt: “We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St Benedict” (p. 263). The point was not nostalgia but recognition: communities of virtue must be rebuilt at the margins of a collapsing order. What Gaza shows is that without such communities, justice is a slogan, solidarity is a spectacle, and memory is reduced to bureaucracy.

MacIntyre died on 21 May 2025. The summons remains.