Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-)

This chapter explores the thought of Alasdair MacIntyre in relation to the just war tradition. It provides a brief intellectual biography. It then turns to three key works that constitute the core of his thought – After Virtue (1981); Whose Justice, Which Rationality (1988), and Three Rival Traditions of Moral Inquiry (1990). In these works, MacIntyre argues that moral discourse has collapsed in the contemporary world because of its disconnect from social and political life. He turns to an Aristotelian Thomism to reconstruct the idea of a tradition of moral inquiry, one that draws on a set of texts and practices and can speak to contemporary moral issues. The chapter notes those occasions where he speaks to questions of war and peace, suggesting that his insights correspond to some of the traditional approaches of figures such as Michael Walzer and James Turner Johnson. MacIntyre both supplements these approaches and also extends them into new possible ways of understanding how a tradition of thought can intersect with the contemporary world.