Patrick Keeney, Ph.D., is a Canadian scholar and writerThe death of Scottish-American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre on May 21 of this year, at the age of 95, marks the passing of one of the twentieth century’s most formidable critics of modern moral thought. Best known for After Virtue (1981), MacIntyre’s intellectual journey — from early Marxism to a mature Thomism — was defined by a sustained effort to expose the fractures within contemporary ethics and to recover a moral tradition grounded in classical and Christian accounts of human flourishing.In an era when the cultural heritage of the West is often dismissed or disdained, MacIntyre’s work serves as a sober reminder of what is lost when we sever ourselves from the moral and metaphysical foundations that once shaped our civilization. His critique of the Enlightenment, along with his suspicion of bureaucratic managerialism and procedural liberalism, resonated with many conservative thinkers.Yet to frame his thought in partisan terms is to miss its deeper philosophical ambition. At the heart of MacIntyre’s work lies a vision of the human person as a “dependent rational animal” — vulnerable, socially embedded, and capable of achieving the good only within communities and practices ordered to shared ends. In Dependent Rational Animals (1999), he extends Aristotle’s definition of man as a rational animal, insisting that our rationality is inseparable from our dependence on others, especially in times of infancy, illness, and decline..In After Virtue, MacIntyre argued that modern moral discourse is a fragmented remnant of a once-coherent worldview. He likened our current moral condition to that of survivors of a civilizational catastrophe, clinging to pieces of an ethical vocabulary without understanding the framework that once gave them coherence. Terms like “virtue,” “justice,” and “duty” still circulate, but have become, in his words, “echoes of a former self.”To address this fragmentation, MacIntyre turned to the idea of practices. A practice, he wrote, is a socially established activity — such as architecture, medicine, teaching, or hockey — that embodies internal goods achievable only through sustained commitment and moral development. These internal goods are not fame or profit, but the satisfactions that come from excellence rightly pursued.One cannot become a skilled hockey player by reading about the game; mastery requires years of training and discipline. The same is true of teaching, medicine, or philosophy. In each case, excellence is inseparable from the virtues that sustain the practice — honesty, courage, patience, and humility. Practices are embedded in traditions, transmitted through communities, and shape the character of those who participate in them. They are not only paths to excellence but also schools of moral formation..Nowhere is this insight more urgent than in the modern university. For MacIntyre, the university is not a credentialing agency or an instrument of the state, but a community of inquiry sustained by practices ordered toward the pursuit of truth. Teaching and scholarship, when rightly understood, are governed by internal standards — rigorous thinking, open argument, and sustained reflection — whose proper end is understanding, not utility.Mark Mercer, a philosopher at Saint Mary’s University, draws on MacIntyre to describe the academic vocation. “The search for truth is to the academic endeavour what trying to win is to playing hockey,” he writes. “Trying to win and seeking the truth shape and guide one’s efforts, but the main point is the engagement.” Excellence lies not in outcomes alone but in the integrity with which one inhabits the practice.The university, in this vision, is a place where inquiry is pursued for its own sake — where the habits of reasoning, debate, and critique are cultivated in service of truth. But when these practices are subordinated to external ends —e conomic demands, ideological conformity, or bureaucratic targets — they are hollowed out. Inquiry becomes performance; education, mere credentialing.This is especially true today, when many universities seem to have lost confidence in their purpose. MacIntyre’s vision challenges us to resist reducing education to workforce preparation or social engineering. The university, he insists, should be a community structured by practices — tradition-bound activities aimed at internal goods, through which students and scholars alike are formed in character and judgment..To reimagine the university in this light is to see it as a moral and civic enterprise: not a marketplace, but a place where knowledge is pursued with care, and persons are shaped for lives of integrity and responsibility. Education is not a product to be consumed, but a formative journey into the inherited traditions of thought and inquiry.Restoring this vision requires more than curricular change. It demands the cultivation of intellectual and moral virtues — patience, honesty, humility, and courage — nurtured within communities where excellence is upheld, and tradition is treated not as a constraint, but as a living inheritance.In an era when universities appear increasingly captive to the whims of politics and the market, MacIntyre offers a more enduring vision: the university as a guardian of intellectual integrity and a community united by the pursuit of truth. His writings do not provide a blueprint for institutional reform, but a call to moral seriousness — a reminder that the renewal of education, and of public life, begins not with policy, but with persons who ask what kind of human beings we are becoming, and what kind of common life we are called to build.Patrick Keeney, Ph.D., is a Canadian scholar and writer.
