MacIntyre’s Virtue Ethics was first expressed in his book After Virtue which sought to rehabilitate Aristotelean Virtue Theory in the light of the attack on naturalism by the empiricist school represented by Moore, Ayer and Hare, and the alleged blind alleys of Kant’s deontology and the Utilitarian teleology. But how much of Aristotle does MacIntyre reject?  This article examines the great difference between Aristotle’s metaphysical biology (the view that man has an essential nature or soul which defines our purposes) and MacIntyre’s sociological teleology (that our purposes are given, not by a metaphysical soul, but by social practices which develop and change,  but create “goods internal to practices”).

 ak_kuna_2008.pdf