- Lived:
- 1929–2025 · Glasgow, London, Oxford, and — after 1970 — America, ending at Notre Dame, Indiana
- Tradition:
- Virtue ethics revived; Aristotelian and Thomist critique of modern moral philosophy
- The Big Idea:
- Modern moral argument is broken because we inherited fragments of an older ethical world without the framework that made them make sense — and the repair is to recover virtues, practices, and living traditions.
- In their words:
- A living tradition, he wrote, is "an historically extended, socially embodied argument."
- If you remember one thing:
- When moral debates feel endless and shrill, MacIntyre's diagnosis is that we're using leftover pieces of incompatible moral systems — and that ethics only works inside a shared way of life aimed at a shared good.