MacIntyrean Theology, Competing Traditions, and Divine Commands
Michael Rauschenbach
University of Notre Dame
Introduction
This paper, which is part of a larger project on the relationship between MacIntyre’s
moral philosophy and his theological development, begins with two puzzles, one exegetical,
one theological. The exegetical puzzle is simple: why, despite his explicit criticisms of the
doctrine, do MacIntyre’s critics so often label him a relativist. The theological puzzle is this:
despite the development of MacIntyre’s views in moral philosophy over the course of his
career, his theological understanding of the relationship that must obtain between our
knowledge of God and independent standards of rational justification changed little from his
earliest writings on the subject as an atheist to his later reflections as a Catholic. My paper
attempts to explore the grounds for this surprising result.
I proceed as follows. I first argue that, despite his anti-relativist inclinations,
MacIntyre’s position can be only insufficiently distinguished from those he criticizes,
because, crucially, he lacks an account of how rationally justified traditions get hooked up
with true moral claims. Secondly, I want to connect this problem to MacIntyre’s treatment
of a complex web of theological beliefs regarding acting on divine commands common to
both Catholicism and to the work of Soren Kierkegaard, through examination of
MacIntyre’s comments on the subject in After Virtue and Kierkegaard After MacIntyre.
MacIntyre thinks it irrational to act according to divine commands for which no justification,
prospectively, can be given. I argue that such actions can only be justified retrospectively, but
that shortcomings in MacIntyre’s account demonstrate precisely why acting in these ways is
nonetheless rational.
I consider some ways MacIntyre might challenge my criticisms on pragmatic
grounds. Nevertheless, I doubt that a satisfying fix compatible with MacIntyre’s overall
theory is available, and I conclude that, on some important moral and theological questions,
one will have to forego providing any prospective rational justification to those external to
one’s tradition. This requires, however, not an abandonment of the project of making truth
claims, but a reassertion of its importance.
Relativism
Inviting the charge of relativism is a natural consequence of the story MacIntyre tells
about the failure of the Enlightenment project. Enlightenment liberalism begins with the
Cartesian attempt to provide an indubitable first principle for reasoning with the cogito and
continues through the Kantian and utilitarian attempts to rationally justify morality by
empirical or transcendental means. MacIntyre’s key insight is that the Enlightenment project
fails to live up to its stated hope of extricating practical reason from the grip of tradition by
providing neutral criteria for reasoned judgments. He says:
Rather, it turns out itself to be just one more such tradition with its own highly
contestable conceptions of practical rationality and of justice…That liberalism fails in
this respect, therefore, provides the strongest reason that we can actually have for
asserting that there is no such neutral ground…There is instead only the practical
rationality of this or that tradition and the justice of this or that tradition.i
The thought that justice and reason might be tradition-relative notions to which no content
can be independently given is suggested by the radical nature of MacIntyre’s indictment of
the liberal project.
This point is precisely, MacIntyre suggests, where the most plausible versions of
moral relativism begin: with the facts of permanent disagreement and the failure of all
attempts to provide neutral criteria with which to adjudicate disputes.ii Of course, the notion
of the truth of moral claims is the looming roadblock to any such interpretation. Truth is a
meaninglessness notion unless it holds at all times and places, universally. Making sense of
practical rationality in light of these considerations thus involves answering the relativist
challenge.
For MacIntyre, the relativist claims, “To conclude this rather than that can be
rational relative to the standards of some particular tradition, but not rational as such. There
can be no rationality as such…Every tradition incorporating a set of standards has as much
and as little claim to our allegiance as any other.”iii
MacIntyre, of course, rejects relativism, and to do so he employs the standard
response to this position, which is that relativism is self-defeating. The relativist cannot
coherently state his position, for by the relativist’s own lights such a claim either represents
merely one more assertion from within a given tradition that is neither true nor false as such,
or it consists in some illegitimate attempt to temporarily remove oneself from the area of
logical space occupied by competing theses to comment on the whole, which is incoherent.
As MacIntyre states forcefully: “[Those in this position have] no adequate relevant means of
rational evaluation and hence can come to no well-grounded conclusion, including the
conclusion that no tradition can vindicate itself against any other. To be outside all traditions
is to be a stranger to enquiry; it is to be in a state of intellectual and moral destitution, a
condition from which it is impossible to issue the relativist challenge.”iv
It seems that something like this common charge must be right. And since
MacIntyre makes it so forcefully himself, he is not a relativist. But matters are not so simple,
precisely because MacIntyre’s eventual description of the relationship between truth and
rational justification to competing traditions can be only insufficiently distinguished from the
relativist position he criticizes.
Truth and Rational Justification
To move beyond the dialectical point that relativism is self-defeating, MacIntyre
needs to develop a fuller picture of the conditions under which one tradition is rationally
justified in claiming truth for its central theses. MacIntyre attempts this in several places. For
instance, he says in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? that the “test for truth in the present,
therefore, is always to summon up as many questions and as many objections of the greatest
strength possible; what can be justifiably claimed as true is what has sufficiently withstood
such a dialectical questioning and framing of objections.”v In Three Rival Versions of Moral
Enquiry, he notes similarly: “No claim to rational superiority…can be made good except on
the basis of a rationally justifiable rejection of the strongest claim to be made out from an
opposing point of view.”vi MacIntyre here introduces a significant ambiguity, for he refers to
the same process—the summoning up of the strongest possible objections to one’s
standpoint—both as the precondition for claiming “rational superiority” and as a “test of
truth.” But it is unclear why such a test would accurately gauge the truth of that tradition’s
central theses, rather than merely their rational superiority.
Indeed, this dialectical process of scrutinizing one’s own positions and responding to
one’s rivals can obviously provide neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for truth. I can
claim that ‘there exist an even number of cars in the hotel parking lot right now’, randomly
and without justification, and what I say can nonetheless be true. So the test cannot be a
necessary condition. Furthermore, scientific examples demonstrate why it cannot be a
sufficient condition either. Newtonian science in the 1800s was maximally capable of
explaining the deficiencies in any rival understandings of science, and, once the scientific
method was widely in use, maximally vulnerable to experimental refutation. However, at
least some propositions of Newtonian science are certainly false. So one way MacIntyre
might want to distinguish himself from the relativist cannot be viable. Whatever one
tradition’s warrant for claiming rational superiority over its rivals, this warrant can provide
neither a necessary nor sufficient condition for the truth of particular theses made from
within the tradition.
In a later essay on this topic, MacIntyre makes this point explicit, as indeed his
position requires. He notes:
It is perhaps less obvious, but as important, that the understanding of truth involved
cannot be one which equates truth with rational justification in any way.vii
But what is the relationship between truth and rational justification, given that they cannot
be equated in any way? MacIntyre proposes at least two criteria.
Disputants in the moral arena must believe “[first] that, if the scheme and mode of
rational justification of some rival moral standpoint supports a conclusion incompatible with
any central thesis of their account, then that scheme and mode must be defective in some
important way and [second, that it must be] capable of being replaced by some rationally superior
scheme and mode of justification, which would not support any such conclusion.”viii Here we have, finally,
the unjustifiable MacIntyrean inference. The first half of the sentence expresses a relatively
unobjectionable logical point; if you claim truth for a conclusion “P”, and there is a rival
argument for “~P”, then you are committed to holding that there is a defect in the
justification proffered by the other side for the conclusion that is the negation of what you
hold to be true. However, it does not at all follow, as the second half of the sentence claims, that such a
faulty scheme must be replaceable with one that justifiably concludes “P” rather than “~P”, or even by any
scheme of rational justification at all!
To see why, consider whether the number of stars in the universe is even or odd.
Clearly, there must be a definite number of stars in the universe at any time. Furthermore,
any argument that was not a mere enumeration of empirical data giving the location of each
star in the universe would be defective in some way, despite the fact that one of the two
logically incompatible arguments must have a true conclusion. So it seems rational to
conclude that there are a definite number of stars, this number is even or odd, and that any
rational justification for either conclusion must be defective. It does not at all follow,
therefore, that if I assert that the number of stars is even, I need conclude that the rival
scheme of justification purporting to show that the number of stars is odd can coherently be
replaced by a better scheme not subject to the same problems. Any justificatory scheme
must be invalid.
The disanalogy between the star-counting and moral or theological arenas is that, in
the star counting case, it is most rational to remain agnostic whether the number of the stars
is even or odd. However, agnosticism is impossible when facing common moral or
theological dilemmas, which are precisely moments of forced choice. One must choose to lie
or not, to abort one’s unwanted pregnancy or not, and it would be the height of irrationality
in those cases to seek to completely avoid the choice before you. For avoiding the choice is
simply to choose one of the possible alternatives.
One can also acknowledge the necessity of choice, while viewing moral dilemmas as
just as epistemically insoluble as the question of whether the number of stars is odd or even.
In fact, given pervasive moral disagreement on nearly every fundamental ethical principle, it
seems eminently reasonable to consider the two cases as analogous. Thus, the rational
conclusion in at least some cases should be both that all schemes of rational justification in
these situations are defective, including one’s own, and that choosing to defend one position
rather than another, acting or refraining, is necessary. So, contra MacIntyre, there seems to be
no connection in certain difficult cases between the truth of the matter and the various
proposed schemes of rational justification.
MacIntyre’s central enthymematic premise, which motivates the unjustified
inference, seems to be that rational enquiry is convergent. That is, if it were the case that
rational enquiry invariably brought us closer to the correct answers on moral questions, then,
in any dispute between rival traditions, that tradition which opened itself up maximally to the
criticisms of the other, and found the internal resources to dispense with those criticisms,
could be assured not only of its rational superiority, but also of being the “shortest distance”
to the truth, in some carefully precisified sense.
However, we have been given no reason to accept the hypothesis of convergence.
Indeed, the facts of our experience of moral disagreement tell strongly against this. This is
where MacIntyre’s position can be only insufficiently distinguished from relativism. For
without assuming convergence, members of rival traditions are left to simply assert their
rational superiority to other traditions, without being at all justified in claiming that what
they believe is true on the basis of purported rational superiority. So ultimately, no tradition
is more or less justified in asserting its truth than any other.
So a sort of skepticism concerning the relation between truth and rational
justification seems justified. This skepticism acknowledges that enquiry aims at truth and that
propositions expressing moral claims have truth values, but denies that any particular
scheme of justification is strictly relevant to the truth on such matters, especially for those
who reject one’s fundamental premises. The rational course of action involves nonetheless
asserting and acting in accordance with what one believes to be true, despite one’s paucity of
justification. Danger undoubtedly lurks in this kind of thinking, so if my account is not to be
wholly negative, some understanding of the role of rational justification must be
reintroduced. Luckily, I think that analyzing MacIntyre’s treatment of Kierkegaard can open
up possibilities for such a positive account. To Kierkegaard, then, I now turn.
Kierkegaard, MacIntyre, Divine Commands
MacIntyre’s critique of Kierkegaard in After Virtue spawned provocative
conversations regarding what MacIntyre gets right, and wrong, in his discussion of
Kierkegaard’s thought. One manifestation of their disagreement most helpfully elucidates
the problem of the connection between rational justification and truth I have discussed thus
far. In the process of examining this disagreement, I hope to suggest how MacIntyre fails to
appreciate what a distinctively Christian account of the relationship between truth and
rational justification can bring to bear on these problems.
For MacIntyre, Kierkegaard has a problem with practical reasoning about the future,
and this problem worsens radically when the issue at hand is the transition from what
Kierkegaard calls the aesthetic to ethical spheres of life, or from the ethical to the religious.
MacIntyre argues that Kierkegaard is committed to criterionless choices:
It does indeed follow from [Kierkegaard’s] view that there are good reasons for
individuals to move from the aesthetic to the ethical and not merely good-reasonsfrom-the-standpoint-of-the-ethical…But this is not in the least inconsistent with the
thesis that the transition from the aesthetic to the ethical is and can be made only by
a criterionless choice. For to be in the aesthetic stage is to have attitudes and beliefs
that disable one from evaluating and appreciating those reasons. One has to have
already chosen oneself as an ethical subject in order to do so. So I reiterate the claim
that, on Kierkegaard’s view, what can retrospectively be understood as rationally
justifiable cannot be thus understood prospectively.ix
MacIntyre argues that Kierkegaard’s problem is that while someone, having already taken on
the demands of the ethical life, can rationally evaluate her current, past, and future ethical
positions, she by definition does not have access to such reasons before she makes the
choice to embrace the ethical. Retrospectively rational choices appear prospectively as
options to which we must respond blindly, without rational criteria for our choosing.
By now, it should be clear that Kierkegaard’s problem is a familiar one: given
pervasive moral disagreement, or given subjects unwilling to even embrace moral categories
of evaluation, one must choose in particular circumstances while recognizing the
insufficiency of any prospectively rational justification for one’s own choices. Richard
Johnson paraphrases Kierkegaard by saying, “Morality that requires intellectual justification
will always be hypothetical, dependent on arguments that may be overturned”x, but it is
Kierkegaard that explicitly connects this situation with religious faith and more specifically
with divine commands. He argues:
“At least the passionate atheist acknowledges that the question posed by the
Incarnation cannot simply be ignored. There is a categorical imperative to choose.
That Christianity is proclaimed to you means that you shall have an opinion about
Christ.xi
Kierkegaard argues that MacIntyre’s paradigm for moral reasoning is ineffective in cases
where definitions of the basic principles of human flourishing are essentially contested. It is
ethically unacceptable to refrain from facing one’s moral and religious choices until one
tradition has emerged rationally superior, and even then, there is no guarantee that such a
victory would signal anything about the truth of that tradition’s claims, particularly in the
moral and religious arena. MacIntyre fails to account for Kierkegaard’s understanding of the
categorical imperative to choose, which applies both in the choice of the ethical versus the
aesthetic, as well as to distinctively Christian dilemmas.
I have suggested that Kierkegaard has the more sensible view of practical rationality,
so why does MacIntyre nonetheless resist this Kierkegaardian picture? I think that a
particular disagreement about divine commands motivates MacIntyre’s reluctance to accept
the Kierkegaardian solution. So I want to defend Kierkegaard’s understanding before saying
a bit about why MacIntyre might nonetheless have some compelling replies to make on his
own behalf.
Divine Commands
In an early article entitled “Atheism and Morals,” when he still identified as an
atheist, MacIntyre argued for the thesis that “theism itself requires and presupposes both a
moral vocabulary which can be understood independently of theistic beliefs and moral
practices which can be justified independently of theistic beliefs.”xii Later, writing well after
converting to Catholicism in an article entitled “Which God Ought We To Obey and Why,”
he makes much the same claim, arguing: “We can…evaluate the divine claims, using a
standard of justice acquired and elaborated independently of the knowledge of God.”xiii
Finally, in responding specifically to his Kierkegaardian critics, he claims:
“Kierkegaard…failed to recognize that God in revealing Himself to us appeals to our
recognition of standards independent of Christian revelation….”xiv
MacIntyre displays a remarkable consistency on this issue, despite his changing
religious views. The position constantly contrasted with MacIntyre’s own is some sort of
divine command theory, a theory plausibly ascribed to Kierkegaard himself. Noticing the
connection between this conversation and the related issues of truth and rational justification
is crucial both for understanding where MacIntyre and Kierkegaard part ways, and for
evaluating their respective paths.
MacIntyre levies two challenges at those who argue that what is good or just is
simply what God commands. First, defining key moral vocabulary in this way seems to rob it
of substantial content; we cannot commend God as being ‘good’ or ‘just’ if His will dictates
the content of these ascriptions. Secondly, MacIntyre believes “that it is very difficult…for
theists to distinguish between God and the devil in the way that they must. For if ‘God is
good’ and ‘We ought to do whatever God commands’ are transformed into tautologies by
means of redefinitions of ‘good’ and ‘right’, it follows that we can have no moral reasons for
obedience to divine commandments…But if we cannot have this kind of reason for
obedience to divine commandments, what other type of reason can there be for such
obedience but the appeal to divine power and to the consequences of flouting it.”xv
Fortunately, I think that Kierkegaard can respond to these two MacIntyrean
challenges. Understanding what sort of divine command each philosopher has in mind is the
first crucial step. Whenever he gives particular examples, the types of commands MacIntyre
discusses are those sorts prohibiting, for example, “theft” or “adultery.”xvi That is, they are
versions of those commandments common not only to Old Testament Christianity and
Judaism, but to many other religions and ethical systems as well.
Kierkegaard, by contrast, focuses solely on Jesus’ command: you shall love your
neighbor as yourself. Phillip Quinn emphasizes the importance of the imperative form of
this statement, saying, “The love of neighbor of which Jesus speaks is unnatural for humans
in their present fallen condition. It does not spontaneously engage their affections, and so
training, self-discipline, and perhaps even divine assistance are needed to make its
achievement a real possibility.’”xvii So whereas MacIntyre is focused on ordinary ethical
demands, Kierkegaard is concerned solely with the seemingly impossible, distinctively
Christian injunction to love one’s neighbor as oneself.
Identifying the two different commands at issue drastically affects MacIntyre’s
argument, for it allows us to construct a multi-leveled account of ethical obligation, and it
shows how MacIntyre reads Kierkegaard both as more and as less Christian than he actually
is. MacIntyre overestimates Kierkegaard’s Christianity in neglecting or underestimating the
substantial non-theological content contained in his account of the ethical. For instance,
MacIntyre says, “I have no difficulty in agreeing with the substance of Kierkegaard’s view of
human nature and more especially with his characterization of the teleology that is central to
[his] view.”xviii
MacIntyre and Kierkegaard both have substantive teleological accounts of the
ethical, complete with well-considered philosophical anthropologies. On MacIntyre’s
teleological account, theism and morality are related in that “God created men with just
those goals, wants, and needs which a way of life embodying the given rules will enable them
to achieve.”xix This natural morality provides standards by which God can be judged to be
just and worthy of worship. What MacIntyre fails to see is that Kierkegaard can put his
teleological account to work to provide a similar account of natural morality. But this means
that as regards certain sections of one’s moral vocabulary—probably ‘just’, ‘right’, and ‘true’
for starters, but certainly other concepts as well—Kierkegaard and MacIntyre can equally
ground key moral concepts in their respective accounts of human nature.
What divides them is the familiar disagreement regarding whether reasons
connecting these grounds to specific claims about the morality of particular actions can be
given prospectively or only retrospectively. Kierkegaard, to reiterate, thinks that a basic
skepticism about one’s knowledge renders prospective rational justification to one who has
not yet accepted the ethical way of life impossible. This skepticism, as I have argued, can be
seen as a response to the inadequacies in MacIntyre’s account of the relation between truth
and rational justification; specifically, Kierkegaard does not share MacIntyre’s unstated and
unsubstantiated views regarding the inevitable convergence of rational enquiry on the truth. I
think Kierkegaard gets the better of these arguments, but more importantly, Kierkegaard
need not resort to divine commands to explain a large, ethical segment of human moral
vocabulary. So Kierkegaard and MacIntyre can provide similarly non-theological arguments
to motivate large segments of ethics.
It remains to grapple with MacIntyre’s underestimation of Kierkegaard’s Christianity.
One divine command—love your neighbor as yourself—still occupies a significant place in
Kierkegaard’s thought. And I think it is fair to say that MacIntyre’s system has so far proven
unable to accommodate such a categorical imperative, despite his conversion to Roman
Catholicism. MacIntyre can make little sense either of this seemingly supererogatory, but
actually required, commanded love, or of the relationship between this sort of love and one’s
relationship to Christ, both of which, on my view, are serious defects springing from an
overly rationalistic demand for prospective rational justification for every action and
allegiance to particular moral demands.
Though in my view Kierkegaard, in endorsing only retrospective rational
justification, compelling describes at least some moral or religious choices, at least two
problems with his view might provide compelling motivation for a MacIntyrean response on
pragmatic grounds. First, MacIntyre could argue that Jesus’ divine command in any
particular situation always admits of multiple interpretations, such that reliance on the divine
command alone to guide action is impossible. His second response would argue that a failure
to observe this fact—that any theological injunction requires interpretive reasoning of the
sort philosophy requires—has dangerous practical consequences. For if one believes that
one has identified the uniquely required, divinely commanded actions, then the sorts of
arguments I endorse here on Kierkegaard’s behalf might engender reluctance or hostility
towards engaging in rational dialogue with one’s opponents. Thus, while MacIntyre believes
that he can offer no a priori argument proving that conditions where it is rational to forego all
prospective rational justification will not arise, he has both technical and pragmatic reasons
for counseling moral reasoners against acting as if such situations are possible. These are
powerful considerations, and an adequate response to them would have to highlight the ways
that divine commands could determine correct particular actions, show why the distinctively
Christian command to love is immune to abuse of the sort MacIntyre might worry about,
and suggest ways that agents might be assisted in their attempts to conform their actions to
God’s will. This would, in the Christian context, require that one present a compelling
account of grace. While I do think some of MacIntyre’s worries can be answered
satisfactorily, I make no attempt to do so in detail here. I merely note that the problem of
prospective versus retrospective rational justification is a deep one, with strong reasons in
favor of both the Kierkegaardian and MacIntyrean solutions.
In this paper, I explored MacIntyre’s account of truth and rational justification. I
argued that it is insufficient, as it relies on an unjustified assumption of the convergence of
rational enquiry. I then defended the rationality of asserting and acting in defense of
particular moral theses while maintaining that any possible rational justifications for such
theses, even one’s own, must be in some way defective, and moreover retrospective rather
than prospective. I then tried to explain this failure in light of several complex theological
issues relating to MacIntyre’s critique of Kierkegaard and his views on the criterionless
choice of the ethical, as well as of Kierkegaard’s account of the necessity for a limited divine
command ethics. MacIntyre and Kierkegaard in fact share teleological accounts of human
nature, each of which serves to ground a large segment of human moral vocabulary.
MacIntyre, however, does not seek to accommodate divine commandments into his account
in any detail, while Kierkegaard makes Jesus’ command to love one’s neighbor central to the
ethical life. MacIntyre, ultimately, asks rational justification to do more than it can do, for
there is no advance set of reasons sufficient to motivate love of one’s neighbor, despite, on
the Christian view, this command’s absolute authority in our lives. Further valuable work to
address possible MacIntyrean counter-responses requires developing a more comprehensive
account of the relationship between divine commands and grace than I have given here.
Thank you.
MacIntyre, Alasdair, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988).
Hereafter I cite from WJWR.
ii MacIntyre, Alasdair, “Moral relativism, truth, and justification,” in The Tasks of Philosophy: Selected Essays Volume
1, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006) pp. 52. Hereafter I cite from MRTJ.
iii WJWR, 352.
iv WJWR, 366.
v WJWR, 358.
vi MacIntyre, Alasdair, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), pp. 181. Hereafter I cite as TRV.
vii MRTJ, 56.
viii MRTJ, 59.
ix MacIntyre, Alasdair, “Once More on Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative,
and Virtue, eds. John Davenport and Anthony Rudd (Chicago: Carus Publishing Company, 2001), pp. 344.
x Johnson, 155.
xi Johnson, 166.
xii MacIntyre, Alasdair, “Atheism and Morals”, in The Debate about God: Victorian Relevance and Contemporary
Irrelevance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), pp. 32.
xiii MacIntyre, Alasdair, “Which God Ought We to Obey and Why?” Faith and Philosophy Vol. 3, No. 4 (Oct.
1986), pp. 370.
xiv MacIntyre, Alasdair, “Once More on Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative,
and Virtue, eds. John Davenport and Anthony Rudd (Chicago: Carus Publishing Company, 2001), pp. 351.
xv MacIntyre, Alasdair, “Atheism and Morals”, in The Debate about God: Victorian Relevance and Contemporary
Irrelevance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), pp. 34.
xvi See, for example, MacIntyre, Alasdair, “Which God Ought We to Obey and Why?” Faith and Philosophy Vol.
3, No. 4 (Oct. 1986), pp. 361, and MacIntyre, Alasdair, “Atheism and Morals”, in The Debate about God: Victorian
Relevance and Contemporary Irrelevance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), pp. 35.
xvii Quinn, Philip L, “The Divine Command Ethics in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, in Faith, Freedom, and
Rationality: Philosophy of Religion Today, eds. Jeff Jordan and Daniel Howard-Snyder (Lanham: Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1996), pp. 30.
xviii MacIntyre, Alasdair, “Once More on Kierkegaard,” in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative,
and Virtue, eds. John Davenport and Anthony Rudd (Chicago: Carus Publishing Company, 2001), pp. 345.
xix MacIntyre, Alasdair, “Atheism and Morals”, in The Debate about God: Victorian Relevance and Contemporary
Irrelevance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), pp. 38.
i