Symptoms Disguised as a Diagnosis
Most people move between different moral registers multiple times daily. At home, you're expected to give unconditionally and treat the people closest to you as ends in themselves. As a citizen, you're told everyone is equal; as a consumer, you're told you deserve more than everyone else. As a churchgoer or community member, sacrifice and solidarity are virtues; as a participant in the economy, self-interest is rational and generosity is optional; at work, you're expected to defer to the boss and treat people as means to institutional ends. None of these registers is insincere — each is locally functional. But they can't be combined into a coherent whole, and anyone who tries to live by a single moral framework across all of them will find that framework breaking against the demands of domains it wasn't designed for.
Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue (1981) offers a sharp diagnosis of this condition. He argues that the Enlightenment project of grounding morality in tradition-independent rational principles failed, leaving us with a vocabulary of moral fragments — bits of Kantian duty, bits of utilitarian calculation, bits of rights language, bits of virtue talk — whose original contexts have been stripped away. The description is accurate. But MacIntyre's account of why it happened, and his proposed remedy, are both wrong in ways that matter. He treats the incoherence as the product of a philosophical failure — the loss of Aristotelian teleology — and proposes the recovery of tradition-embedded community as the solution.
This essay argues that the incoherence has a material cause, not a philosophical one. It is produced by the separation of social reproduction into institutionally distinct domains — market, state, household, profession, church — each operating by its own logic, each serving different class functions, each generating a moral register that contradicts the others. The separation is older than MacIntyre's narrative allows: it is a feature of class society as such, not a specifically modern consequence of the Enlightenment's philosophical failure, though capitalism has deepened it beyond anything previous class societies achieved. MacIntyre's proposed remedy — tradition-bearing communities organized around shared practices and virtues — cannot address this, because it never asks who controls the community's resources, whose needs the arrangement serves, and whose it requires the frustration of. Without a power analysis and without a commitment to the universality of human needs, the remedy will predictably reproduce the class dynamics it claims to have escaped. My alternative, summarized here in compressed form, provides both an explanation of why these moral registers can't be synthesized and a criterion for evaluating forms of community that MacIntyre's framework cannot supply.[1]
I. What MacIntyre gets right
MacIntyre shows that the incoherence is not superficial. It is not a matter of political disagreement resolved by better reasoning. When a politician appeals to "individual rights" against a critic invoking "the common good," there is no shared framework within which the disagreement can be resolved, because the concepts come from rival and incompatible traditions, decontextualized and thrown together. The debate is interminable not because the participants are stupid or insincere but because they are drawing on moral resources that were never designed to coexist and that, shorn of their original theoretical settings, provide no procedure for adjudication. MacIntyre calls the result emotivism: moral statements that appear to be impersonal rational claims in practice are expressions of preference.
The diagnosis extends beyond public discourse. MacIntyre argues that the characters produced by modern culture — the aesthete, the manager, the therapist — all embody this condition. The manager treats all questions as technical problems of efficiency, never asking "efficient for what?" or "toward what end?" — because the moral framework that could answer such questions is empty. The therapist adjusts people to their circumstances without asking whether the circumstances deserve adjustment to. The aesthete meanwhile has given up on rational moral evaluation and pursues experience for its own sake. None of these characters is a villain. Each persona fits a culture in which substantive moral reasoning has become impossible because the shared framework that could ground it has been disassembled.
MacIntyre traces this condition to the abandonment of a specific moral-intellectual tradition. The Aristotelian-Christian framework that preceded it in Western Europe had three elements: a conception of human nature as it happens to be (untutored, driven by desire), a conception of human nature as it could be if it realized its telos (flourishing, virtuous, fulfilling its proper function), and a set of moral precepts that constituted the means of transition from the first condition to the second. Morality was intelligible because it served a purpose: it was the technology for getting from raw human nature to fulfilled human nature. Remove the teleological endpoint — as the Reformation, the scientific revolution, and the Enlightenment progressively did — and moral precepts lose their rationale. They become free-floating imperatives with no explanation for why anyone should follow them.
This is where MacIntyre's argument resonates most strongly on the left, even though MacIntyre himself moved away from Marxism. The critique of liberal individualism — the fiction of the autonomous chooser, the treatment of community as merely an arena for the pursuit of self-chosen ends, the inability to articulate shared goods — overlaps substantially with what Marxists have said about bourgeois ideology since at least the Grundrisse. Marx's critique of the Robinsonades — the tendency of classical political economy to project the isolated bourgeois individual back onto human nature as such — targets the same abstraction MacIntyre attacks from a different direction. The liberal self who springs forth as a fully formed agent with pre-social preferences to sign the social contract is a fiction for both — though they see different things behind it. The person who reads MacIntyre after reading Marx recognizes the terrain.
But the overlap conceals a divergence that determines everything that follows. MacIntyre and Marx agree that the liberal autonomous self is an abstraction. They disagree fundamentally about what it is an abstraction from. For MacIntyre, it is an abstraction from tradition-embedded communal life — the practices, narratives, and shared goods that give individuals their identity and moral orientation. For Marx, it is an abstraction from the relations of production — the material organization of social life that determines what kinds of selves are produced and what moral vocabularies are available to them. This is not a minor difference in emphasis. It determines whether you think the solution is the recovery of communal practices (MacIntyre) or the transformation of material relations (Marx) — and it determines whether you can even see the problem clearly.
II. What the Enlightenment project was actually for
MacIntyre presents the Enlightenment moral philosophers — Kant grounding morality in rational agency, the utilitarians in the calculation of consequences, the social contract theorists in hypothetical consent — as participants in a genuine intellectual project that was doomed by its starting premises. The narrative runs: serious thinkers tried and failed, and we inhabit the wreckage.
The wreckage is real. The characterization of the project is not. What Kant, Mill, and the rest were doing was not attempting to rationally ground morality in general. They were attempting to rationally justify the moral order required by the social arrangements they inhabited — and by omitting those arrangements from critical examination, their work recursively shored them up. The specific thing that needed defending was the coexistence of formal equality with substantive hierarchy: the proposition that all human beings are morally equal and that class-structured institutional life is legitimate. The reconciliation worked through restriction. Kant's categorical imperative demands that every person be treated as an end and never merely as a means — but a social order in which most people spend their lives serving others' ends requires limiting who counts as fully rational, what "consent" means, and what falls within the scope of "person." These restrictions are not inconsistencies a more rigorous Kantian could repair: extending the principle consistently produces conclusions incompatible with the wage relation, patriarchal authority, colonial domination, and the property regime. Mill's utilitarianism operates by the same logic: "each to count for one, nobody for more than one" — except that his distinction between higher and lower pleasures reintroduces hierarchy (only those whose class position gave them access to higher education can judge), and On Liberty's explicit exemption of "barbarians" from the principle of self-determination licenses the domination of most of humanity while preserving the framework's universalist face.
Both frameworks also center the wrong thing. Kant's insistence that lying is always wrong — even to a murderer asking where your friend is hiding — makes the structure visible: the person who refuses to lie to protect another's life treats their own moral purity as more salient than another person's survival. Real moral situations routinely force a choice between wrongs, and a framework that cannot navigate this defaults to prioritizing the agent's subjective virtue over the needs of those affected by the decision.[2] A sophisticated Kantian can accommodate this by arguing that "treat every person as an end" is the more fundamental formulation and the lying prohibition a derived application — but that move just pushes the incoherence one level deeper: which formulation takes priority, and by what procedure do you decide? The interminability MacIntyre diagnoses is already present within Kant. The utilitarian response — dispense with purity, just maximize welfare — replaces agent-centering with calculator-centering, which has its own class logic: the colonial administrator maximizing economic output and the factory owner maximizing efficiency are following utilitarian logic faithfully. In both cases, whose position is secure enough to afford the luxury of clean hands — or the authority to calculate on others' behalf — tracks the class structure the framework serves.
MacIntyre reads this pattern — the restrictions, the internal inconsistency, the inability to deliver on the universalist promise — as evidence that the whole enterprise of tradition-independent moral reasoning is doomed. The alternative reading: the enterprise was never tradition-independent in the first place. It was a set of philosophical projects, pursued across different national and intellectual contexts, that arrived at different conclusions but shared a common constraint: all had to remain roughly compatible with bourgeois social arrangements. Where philosophical consistency would have required challenging those arrangements — as when Mill followed utilitarian premises to the conclusion that women's legal subordination was unjustifiable, or when Kant argued in "Perpetual Peace" that colonization violated the rights of non-European peoples — their contemporaries treated the conclusions as impractical utopianism or quietly set them aside.[3] The failure tells us that a social order combining formal equality with substantive hierarchy cannot be rationally justified in universalist terms. Not about universalism as such.
MacIntyre's own intellectual history contains a clue he does not follow up. The very concept of "morality" as a freestanding domain — a set of obligations that can be reasoned about independently of theology, law, or custom — is itself a historical invention, not a perennial feature of human thought. As long as Western Christendom operated under a shared moral-theological framework, there was no need for a separate category called "morality" — moral questions were settled within that framework, and the vocabulary for settling them was theological, juridical, and customary rather than "moral" in the modern sense. It was the Reformation's fracturing of that shared authority, and the Wars of Religion that followed — culminating in the Thirty Years' War — that created the practical crisis: how to maintain moral agreement in societies where people no longer shared a theological framework. Grotius's claim that natural law would hold etiamsi daremus — even if God did not exist — is one early response; Kant's categorical imperative is a later one. "Morality" as an autonomous domain was constructed because the institutional conditions that had made a shared moral vocabulary possible without it had been destroyed.
This is not to deny that ancient Greek ethics and Aquinas's natural-law theory already grounded moral argument partly independently of religious authority. But "morality" as a separate domain requiring its own philosophical foundations was called into existence by a material crisis. The class that had the strongest interest in a non-sectarian moral vocabulary was the emerging bourgeoisie, whose commercial economy required cooperation across confessional lines and whose property regime needed legitimation that could survive the collapse of shared theological authority. The Enlightenment moral project was thus occasioned by the same religious fragmentation, state formation and the emergence of trans-sectarian commercial society that were producing the bourgeoisie as a class.
This is why MacIntyre's either/or does not hold. He states the stakes directly: "either one must follow through the aspirations and the collapse of the different versions of the Enlightenment project until there remains only the Nietzschean diagnosis and the Nietzschean problematic or one must hold that the Enlightenment project was not only mistaken, but should never have been commenced in the first place." Either Nietzsche or Aristotle. Either morality is the expression of arbitrary will, or it must be grounded in a teleological tradition.[4] The dilemma holds only if the Enlightenment project was a fair test of tradition-independent moral reasoning — a genuine attempt at universalism that failed on its own terms, proving such reasoning impossible. It was not. It was a test of whether universalist moral reasoning can be made compatible with class rule. MacIntyre's "no third alternative" is an artifact of having restricted the field to intellectual history: if you examine only the philosophical arguments and find them all wanting, it looks like the options are exhausted. If you ask why the arguments took the shape they did — what material arrangements they were designed to legitimate — a third possibility opens that MacIntyre never considers.
MacIntyre adds that "it is no wonder that the teaching of ethics is so often destructive and skeptical in its effects upon the minds of those taught." He reads this as confirming the bankruptcy of Enlightenment moral philosophy. But students taught Hume, Kant, and Mill sense the incoherence because the frameworks genuinely are trying to reconcile irreconcilable commitments — formal equality with substantive hierarchy — and no amount of philosophical sophistication can make the reconciliation work. The skepticism is evidence that the class compromise at the heart of Enlightenment morality is detectable even by those who have not been told to look for it. That is a different diagnosis from MacIntyre's, and it has different implications: not that moral reasoning needs to be re-embedded in tradition, but that it needs to stop serving arrangements that make coherence impossible.
III. The material production of moral incoherence
What specifically produces the incoherence?[5]
"Why Competing Solidarities Tend to Win" develops the materialist alternative in detail.[6] Human social reproduction depends on multiple dimensions — subsistence, care, identity, participation, recognition — characteristically addressed within the same practices rather than separated across institutions. Classed societies reorganize this by separating it into institutionally distinct domains. The market addresses subsistence (partially, conditionally, through the wage). The state addresses protection (selectively, in ways calibrated to maintain the labor force and property relations).
The family, in its dominant institutional form, addresses affection and care — but differently for different members: the man receives domestic labor, care, and deference without having to reciprocate on comparable terms; the woman provides these under conditions of economic dependence that make the provision structurally non-voluntary; children receive care but under unaccountable parental authority over their labor, time, development, and social world. Each position within the household carries a different moral register, and the person who refuses to play along finds out what enforces it: the woman who stops deferring is "difficult" or "cold"; the child who talks back is giving "lip" and needs to learn respect; the man who does too much care work is "whipped." The registers are maintained not by philosophical commitment but by the costs of deviation — withdrawal of affection, economic punishment, social humiliation — calibrated to each position. Religious institutions address meaning and identity (in forms that legitimate hierarchy and discipline deviance). The professions address understanding and creation (gatekept by credentialing, organized to serve institutional interests). Each domain operates by its own logic, serves its own masters, and addresses a narrow range of needs — while the others are left to be filled by whatever is on offer.
The moral incoherence MacIntyre describes is the experiential product of this separation. The market rewards self-interested calculation. The family demands selfless care of the woman while granting authority to the man — and frames both as love, so that the non-reciprocity disappears behind the moral register. The workplace requires obedience to authority. Civic life invokes equality and participation. The church preaches humility and submission. Each moral register is locally functional — but they cannot be synthesized into a coherent whole, because the domains serve different functions within the reproduction of class relations. Within each domain, need-fulfillment is itself conditional and competitive — subsistence through the market if you can sell your labor, protection through the state if you qualify, belonging through the community if you conform — so the irreconcilability is not a philosophical illusion but an accurate perception of arrangements that have made need-satisfaction zero-sum. And the fragmentation deepens over time rather than stabilizing, because the commodification process that drives the separation is progressive: each stage of commodification restructures the internal logic of another domain, creating new contradictions between registers that had previously coexisted in tension rather than outright conflict.
The male worker who holds egalitarian values at the union hall, exercises authority over wife and children in the household, defers to his employer at work, and consumes as an autonomous chooser at the mall is not suffering from philosophical confusion. He is navigating a social order that genuinely requires different moral orientations in different domains. The interminability of moral debate that MacIntyre diagnoses is not a consequence of the loss of Aristotelian teleology. It is a consequence of a social order in which the domains of life are actually governed by incompatible logics, and in which any attempt to apply a single moral framework consistently across all domains will produce either practical paralysis or confrontation with the class relations the separation serves.[7]
MacIntyre's own characters make the point against his own reading. The manager who treats all questions as technical efficiency is not suffering from the loss of Aristotelian teleology — the manager is performing an institutional role that trains a specific cognitive orientation: seeing through procedural criteria rather than seeing the person, reducing those affected to administered categories. The therapist who adjusts people to their circumstances without questioning the circumstances inhabits the same structure — the role defines the domain, and within the domain the person's needs disappear behind the diagnostic category. What MacIntyre describes as the cultural product of philosophical failure is the cognitive product of institutional role-reduction — the same mechanism that operates wherever class-structured institutions get people to participate in the organized frustration of others' needs without experiencing it as such.
This reframing has a specific consequence for MacIntyre's narrative about the Enlightenment. He tells a story of progressive intellectual failure: the tradition provided moral coherence, the Enlightenment destroyed the tradition's teleological foundation, and the result was the emotivist chaos we inhabit. The materialist alternative tells a different story: moral coherence was never primarily a product of intellectual frameworks. It was a product of practices in which the dimensions of human functioning were addressed together rather than separated into institutionally distinct domains governed by different class interests. The Aristotelian-Christian framework didn't produce moral coherence ex nihilo. Frameworks are not merely reflective — they stabilize what they describe, foreclose alternatives, train perception — and to that extent the Aristotelian-Christian tradition partly constituted the coherence it articulated. But its capacity to reinforce coherence depended on that coherence already being materially present in a social order that was feudal, hierarchical, oppressive in its own ways, but less internally fragmented than what followed.
And the reason it was less fragmented is not philosophical but material: in feudal society, the institutional separation of domains was shallow. Most people's moral world was organized by custom, proximity, and overlapping personal dependencies — not by Aristotelian categories. The Aristotelian-Christian framework was an elite production, formulated by clerics with interpretive authority over arrangements the majority navigated without benefit of philosophy. What MacIntyre presents as the loss of a shared tradition is largely the loss of an elite self-description that claimed credit for a coherence it had not produced. The lord's household was simultaneously a unit of production, governance, and worship; the church was a landowner and employer as much as a religious institution; the guild regulated its members' social and moral lives alongside their economic activity. Because the same authority structures ran through all of them — personal dependence, face-to-face domination, religious legitimation of hierarchy — the moral registers didn't contradict each other as sharply as they do when market, state, household, and profession operate by genuinely different logics and justifications. The overlap also meant that the person exercising authority encountered the subordinate across multiple dimensions — as worker, as neighbor, as fellow parishioner — which made it harder (not impossible, but harder) to reduce them to a single administered function. The rest of the community could confront you with how you treated someone, because they saw you in the same contexts. This is a real constraint on domination, and its loss under institutional separation is a real loss — but it operated only within the boundary of those recognized as full members. Slaves, servants, and those the community placed outside its moral perimeter were exempt from this protection, which is why the worst abuses in pre-capitalist societies were concentrated on precisely those populations. The coherence was real, but it was the coherence of a less internally contradictory system of domination — one that had not yet been forced to distribute itself across separate institutions with incompatible justificatory vocabularies.
What capitalism did was deepen this separation beyond anything previous class societies had achieved — not merely by separating the domains further but by restructuring each domain's internal logic through commodification. The household was reorganized around wage dependence, education was gatekept by credentialing markets, care was progressively commodified. The moral registers became actively contradictory rather than merely different, because each domain had been internally reshaped by a process that had reached different depths in different domains. This is why the fragmentation MacIntyre diagnoses is specifically modern in its intensity, even though the class-structured separation of social reproduction is far older than capitalism.
His most vivid illustration makes the point against his own conclusion. He compares modern moral vocabulary to the Polynesian taboo rules that Cook's seamen encountered in the late eighteenth century: rules that had survived the context that once made them intelligible, whose practitioners could no longer explain what they meant or why they should be followed. The analogy holds — but MacIntyre treats the loss of context as an intellectual and cultural process, a failure of the tradition to sustain its own self-understanding. What he does not mention is the material disruption that preceded the collapse. By the time Kamehameha II abolished the Hawaiian taboos in 1819, European contact had already reorganized the islands' material life — trade relations had restructured production, introduced diseases had devastated the population, and military technology had shifted the basis of political authority. The "moral vacuum" MacIntyre describes was not produced by a failure of philosophical self-interpretation. It was produced by a material transformation that made the social practices within which the taboo rules had been embedded no longer functional. The rules became unintelligible because the forms of life they had regulated had been dismantled — which is exactly what the materialist reading predicts, and exactly what the purely intellectual reading cannot explain.
The development economist Manfred Max-Neef (Human Scale Development, 1991) provides a diagnostic vocabulary for naming what the institutional separation does. He identifies needs as non-hierarchical and universal and distinguishes sharply between needs (few and broadly shared) and satisfiers (the concrete, historically variable means by which needs are met). I have built on his and Marshall Rosenberg's refinements to develop a thirteen-dimension framework grounded in biological and anthropological evidence: subsistence, protection, connection/belonging, recognition, understanding, participation, play, creation, identity, autonomy/freedom, order/harmony, efficacy/power-to, mourning/celebration. In these terms, the institutional separation described above is the systematic replacement of multidimensional satisfiers — practices that address several needs simultaneously under collective governance — by narrower, shallower, institutionally separated satisfiers under class-structured administration.
The philosophical incoherence is real, but it is a symptom of this material fragmentation, not its cause. And the coherence MacIntyre wants to recover was never as innocent as his narrative implies: Aristotelian Athens grounded its teleology in a social order that excluded slaves, women, and manual laborers from full humanity, and Thomistic Christianity provided the moral architecture for feudal hierarchy. These were not frameworks that happened to coexist with class rule — they were frameworks whose coherence depended on naturalizing the class arrangements they described.[8] Recovering Aristotelian teleology will not undo the separation of social life that class relations have produced — and building organizational forms that address multiple dimensions together does not require a framework whose prior coherence was purchased at that price.
MacIntyre could argue that the institutional separation described above required philosophical legitimation, and the Enlightenment project provided it. The market economy needed moral frameworks that centered individual autonomy, rational choice, and formal equality; the Enlightenment philosophers supplied several, mutually incompatible but all sharing the same constraint. On this reading, the material reorganization and the philosophical project are not rival explanations for moral incoherence but complementary ones: the material base produced the separation, and the philosophical superstructure made it seem rational. If this is right, MacIntyre's account of intellectual history would still be essential — it would explain the legitimation even if it missed the underlying cause.
But this concedes the crucial point — in both directions.
If the Enlightenment moral framework is the legitimation of a material reorganization, then its incoherence is a consequence of contradictions in what it legitimates, not of the inherent impossibility of tradition-independent moral reasoning. And if the same relationship holds for the Aristotelian-Christian framework — if its coherence, too, was the product of the social order it described and legitimated — then what MacIntyre presents as a philosophical achievement to be recovered is in fact a set of class arrangements to be analyzed. The Enlightenment framework is incoherent because the social order it serves is contradictory (formal equality plus substantive hierarchy). The Aristotelian framework was coherent because the social order it served was less internally contradictory — not because it was just, but because its exclusions were explicit and its hierarchy was openly enforced rather than formally denied. Neither framework's relationship to its material conditions is the one MacIntyre's narrative requires. Moral vocabularies are portable: they survive transitions in ruling-class composition because successive ruling configurations seize whatever vocabulary is available and press it into the same service — the sorting of populations into those whose suffering counts and those whose does not. The Aristotelian framework served feudal class rule; the Enlightenment framework serves bourgeois class rule; and the incoherence MacIntyre diagnoses is not a sign that the vocabulary is broken but that the class compromise it legitimates is contradictory.
MacIntyre's conclusion — that we must return to tradition-embedded moral reasoning because the Enlightenment alternative has failed — does not follow from his own best account of what happened. What follows is that we need a moral framework adequate to a social order that does not require the coexistence of formal equality with substantive hierarchy — a social order that has abolished class rule. Whether such a framework is "tradition-dependent" or "tradition-independent" is a second-order question. What matters is that it is adequate to its material conditions in a way that neither the Enlightenment nor the Aristotelian framework was.
IV. The evaluative ground
The alternative, then, is not a repetition of the Kantian move. It's not "all rational agents have dignity" — which, as MacIntyre shows, leaves open who counts as rational, who qualifies as an agent, and how dignity coexists with hierarchy. It's an empirical claim about species-typical requirements for social functioning: these are the dimensions of need that members of this species have, grounded in what we know about cooperative breeding and the multidimensional character of social reproduction, and arrangements that systematically frustrate them produce identifiable pathologies. This is testable, not metaphysical. It makes no appeal to tradition-independent reason but to tradition-independent facts.
MacIntyre's framework generates a specific objection here. He argues that the is/ought gap is not a permanent truth of logic but a historical artifact — a consequence of abandoning the Aristotelian functional concept of "man" that once made evaluative conclusions derivable from factual premises. Aristotle's original version grounded this in biology: humans have a species-specific function (ergon), and what counts as flourishing follows from how well that function is realized. But MacIntyre explicitly abandons this grounding. He argues that Aristotle's "metaphysical biology" is not defensible and need not be retained — what matters is the structure of practices, narrative unity, and tradition, which together supply the telos that biology no longer can. His solution to the is/ought gap is therefore not to restore Aristotle's biological bridge but to replace it with tradition-embedded teleology: the telos is constituted by the tradition, not discovered in the species.
This replacement undermines the bridging work it claims to do. If the telos is tradition-constituted rather than biologically grounded, then what closes the is/ought gap is not a fact about human nature but a commitment internal to a tradition. The closure is circular: the tradition provides the telos, and the telos validates the tradition's moral conclusions. Different traditions generate different teloi, and MacIntyre's framework provides no cross-traditional ground for adjudication — which is his stated position, but it means the gap has been relocated rather than closed. The objection to a needs-based alternative is therefore that biological facts cannot generate moral conclusions without a teleological framework, and that the only viable teleological frameworks are tradition-dependent.
There is, however, a piece of evidence that bears directly on this objection. Human beings do in fact respond to perceived need in others — with distress, with the impulse to help, with physiological activation — before any moral reasoning kicks in and regardless of what tradition they belong to. Infants do it. Adults do it across cultural boundaries. And the process is not passive detection of a fact: needs are actively expressed — through behavior, voice, face, and body — and perceived through an interpretive process that reads the other's state and draws the observer into responsiveness before deliberation begins. The response is not learned from a tradition; it is a feature of the species' neurobiological equipment, and it appears to cross the is/ought gap on its own: a being in need communicates that need, another perceives it and is moved to respond, and no tradition needs to supply the normative force.
But the biology is more complicated than this suggests, and getting the complication right matters for the rest of the argument. The same neurochemical systems (oxytocin pathways prominently among them) that enable bonding, trust, and cooperative behavior toward those perceived as included simultaneously promote vigilance, derogation, and coordinated aggression toward those perceived as excluded (De Dreu et al. 2011, De Dreu & Kret 2016, Samuni et al. 2017, Zhang et al. 2019).[9]
Oxytocin does not promote prosociality in general. It promotes conditional prosociality — empathy and cooperation for those perceived as belonging to one's group, hostility toward those perceived as outside it. The system is context-dependent: the same pathways that promote exclusion under intergroup competition promote trust and receptive engagement under conditions of perceived safety (De Dreu & Kret 2016). Neither face is more biological than the other — which expression predominates depends on the conditions. This coupling is not unique to humans — it appears in chimpanzee intergroup conflict and across experimentally induced competitive conditions. The neurochemical system that enables solidarity within a group is the same system that enables coordinated violence against outsiders.
The empathic response to perceived need — the experience of encountering another's needs as an invitation to contribute rather than as a burden — is real, and it is prior to moral reasoning. But it operates within the scope of those perceived as included. For those perceived as excluded, the same needs can trigger indifference, contempt, or in extreme cases a failure to register as social information at all (Harris & Fiske 2007). The is/ought bridge exists, but it has a built-in boundary: it extends to those we perceive as belonging with us. And who we perceive as belonging with us depends on how we have been socialized — which categories class-structured institutions train us to treat as salient, which forms of proximity and reciprocity they teach us to recognize, and which to overlook.
One mechanism of this restriction operates at the conceptual level. The concept of innocence — the moral-accounting category that determines whose bodily integrity counts and whose does not — captures the pre-evaluative responsiveness to visible need and recodes it as recognition of a moral status — one that can be assessed, granted, and revoked. The tenderness you feel toward an infant feels like evidence that innocence is a real moral property, which gives the moral-accounting framework an experiential anchor it could not generate on its own.[10] The restriction of empathic scope therefore operates not only on who falls within the boundary of perceived inclusion but on the responsiveness itself: the unconditional response is made to feel like recognition of a conditional status, and the withdrawal of response from those classified as not-innocent feels like moral perception rather than trained narrowing. The capture is most effective where communal bonds are strongest — where the pre-evaluative responsiveness is most intensely felt and therefore most available for recoding.
What distinguishes the human species is the unusual flexibility of these boundaries — a product of cooperative breeding and alloparenting, which produced empathic boundaries far more responsive to social organization than those of other social primates. This flexibility is what makes the conditioning so consequential. Because the boundaries are not fixed by kinship or proximity alone, they can be shaped — conditioned toward wider scope by organizational forms that build shared activity across conventional boundaries, or toward narrower scope by class-structured sorting that trains people to withhold empathic response from those marked as undeserving. The biological foundation of the argument is not a guarantee of universal solidarity but a capacity whose deployment is always socially organized — and therefore always a question of what kind of social organization is in place.
How this capacity was produced matters for what follows, because the evolutionary history constrains the needs taxonomy — identifying which functional requirements are species-typical rather than artifacts of current arrangements. The human self-domestication hypothesis holds that coalitionary enforcement against aggressive dominants — the collective suppression of reactive aggression by cooperating subordinates — was not merely a behavioral pattern but an actual selection pressure that shaped the species phenotypically over evolutionary time. Unlike the domestication of other species, which was largely imposed externally by human selection for tameness, human self-domestication was driven from within the group: coalitions of subordinates selecting against reactive aggression in dominant individuals, while maintaining the capacity for proactive, coalitionary aggression.[11]
The teleological framing, however, rests on a premise that the evidence dissolves. It assumes that without a tradition-supplied telos, biological facts are normatively inert — brute nature onto which philosophical frameworks must impose moral structure from outside. But needs are not normatively inert. They are functional requirements of the organism, and their frustration produces identifiable damage — individually through pathological behavior, socially through the organizing responses (mutual aid, revolt, solidarity formation) that need-frustration generates. The damage is observable across species and across institutional arrangements, regardless of what tradition prevails where it occurs. The normative force derives from these consequences, not from the evolutionary process that produced the equipment — not from the claim that what our ancestors collectively enforced deserves continued respect. This is not deriving ought from is. It is recognizing that the consequences of need-frustration carry evaluative force independently of how the equipment was produced.[12]
This claim comes from somewhere. It is produced within intellectual traditions — Marxist political economy, development economics, evolutionary anthropology, comparative psychology — each of which has its own history, its own internal debates, its own characteristic limitations. It would be incoherent to deny this while insisting that other frameworks are shaped by their social origins. The question is whether a claim's origin within a tradition confines its validity to that tradition. Physics developed within specific intellectual communities with specific metaphysical commitments, but the orbit of Mars is not tradition-dependent. A tradition that organizes its agriculture in ways that deplete the soil will face crop failure regardless of how sophisticated its theological or philosophical self-correction becomes. The soil does not care about the tradition's epistemology. Neither do the neurochemical systems that regulate human bonding and aggression.
The relevant criterion for comparing traditions is therefore not only intellectual — which tradition resolves more of its own conceptual problems, which can better explain the failures of its rivals — but material. In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), MacIntyre developed the intellectual criterion into a sophisticated framework: traditions can be rationally compared when one enters "epistemological crisis" — its own methods of enquiry generating problems it cannot resolve — and a rival tradition demonstrates it can explain the crisis better than the tradition in crisis can. This is more than crude incommensurability; it provides a real mechanism for inter-traditional adjudication. But the criterion remains exclusively intellectual. A tradition can resolve every epistemological crisis it encounters while systematically frustrating the needs of those it governs or excludes — and the framework provides no way to register the destruction, because MacIntyre's abandonment of Aristotle's biological grounding (discussed above) left him with no tradition-independent content against which a tradition's material consequences could be measured. The material question is the one his framework structurally cannot ask: which tradition's way of organizing social life actually works, given that human bodies have species-typical requirements, ecosystems have carrying capacities, and energy flows have thermodynamic constraints? No tradition can theorize these away. A tradition can redescribe crop failure as divine punishment, but the crops are still dead. It can redescribe the pathologies produced by systematic need-frustration as moral weakness, but the pathologies persist — and in this case the redescription is not merely useless but actively harmful: it layers self-blame on top of the original frustration, compounding the damage by training the affected person to treat a structural condition as a personal failing. Material resistance does not provide a view from nowhere — it is always perceived and interpreted within some framework — but it provides a constraint on what any framework can sustain in practice, and that constraint is what makes comparison possible without requiring a tradition-independent standpoint.
The qualitative dimension
The sharpest MacIntyrean objection, however, is not metaethical but qualitative — that the needs framework is reductive, an administrative checklist of dimensions to be covered. If the alternative to MacIntyre is a welfare bureaucracy that ticks boxes (subsistence: covered; protection: covered; participation: covered), then his tradition-bearing communities, for all their exclusionary dangers, offer something qualitatively richer. If the needs framework were in fact administrative, the objection would be decisive. It isn't.
A prison covers subsistence, protection, and social contact. Being confined in one is not a good human life. The difference is not that the prison fails to tick enough boxes. It is that the prison destroys the responsive relationship between persons that makes need-fulfillment a form of social life rather than a form of administration. (That prisoners form gangs, protection networks, and mutual-aid structures is evidence for the argument, not against it: the formations are responses to need-frustration under extreme coercion, and the conditions ensure they reproduce the exclusionary logic the institution imposes.) The qualitative dimension MacIntyre rightly values — the difference between genuine moral community and mere institutional provision — is real, and the needs framework can account for it without requiring Aristotelian teleology.
The capacity to perceive another being's needs as an invitation to respond rather than as a problem to be managed is not foreign to MacIntyre's own tradition. The contemplative Christian practices of compassionate attention — from the Desert Fathers through Meister Eckhart to the modern practitioners of centering prayer — cultivate precisely this perceptual shift: seeing suffering rather than judging the sufferer, responding to need rather than evaluating desert. Nor is it exclusive to Christianity. Buddhist practice cultivates the same shift through different methods. The Sufi emphasis on the heart's capacity to perceive what the calculating mind cannot, various indigenous practices of deep listening — all converge on the same claim: that there is a form of perception in which the needs of other beings register not as problems to be solved but as occasions for response. Developing this perception is, across these traditions, central to what it means to mature as a human being. Marshall Rosenberg's work on nonviolent communication is among the clearest attempts to extract the capacity from the metaphysical frameworks that have historically carried it and articulate it in secular, teachable terms.
A distinction developed in the companion essay on the family complicates the convergence claim.[13] What these traditions cultivate may be the pre-evaluative register — responsiveness to need without categorization — or it may be a generalized innocence perception: evaluation suspended for all beings on the grounds that all are suffering, all are "not responsible" for their condition, all are objects of compassion rather than judgment. The two produce similar phenomenology (tenderness, responsiveness, the absence of condemnation) but different structural properties. The pre-evaluative register is robust: it holds when the other person does something that looks willful, hostile, or offensive, because it responds to need regardless of the observer's evaluation of the behavior. The generalized innocence perception is fragile at exactly those points — it breaks when the person looks responsible for their condition, when compassion fatigue sets in, when the practice encounters someone whose behavior triggers the evaluative apparatus. The conditions under which contemplative practice occurs — material security, social seclusion, guided instruction — are conditions that minimize exactly the encounters where the distinction would show. A practitioner tested only against other practitioners, or against beings who can be easily classified as innocent (animals, children, the visibly suffering), may be cultivating the innocence perception without knowing it. The test is what happens when the practice encounters the person who looks guilty.
The cross-cultural convergence is itself evidence that this capacity is real and species-typical rather than the invention of any particular tradition. But the class dimension is equally striking: virtually every tradition that cultivates this capacity reserves it for specialists — monks, mystics, contemplatives, healers — whose material needs are provided for by others' labor. The monastery that produces saints is sustained by the peasants who produce its food. The capacity for widened empathic perception is, in class societies, a luxury good — available to those whose subsistence, protection, and daily reproduction are handled by someone else's work. This is not an argument against the capacity. It is an argument about the material conditions it requires. If the development of wider empathic perception depends on having one's own needs met, then a social order that systematically frustrates most people's needs is also systematically preventing most people from developing the perceptual capacity that would generate broader solidarity. The class structure doesn't just restrict who receives empathy. It restricts who can perceive needs clearly enough to respond.
The capacity to see needs underlying behavior — rather than reading behavior as evidence of character or desert — is one precondition for widening the scope of empathic response beyond what class-mediated categories permit. Not because it produces universal empathy (the biology doesn't support that), but because it loosens the grip of meritocratic sorting on who registers as deserving of response. Meritocratic training is a systematic impairment of that capacity: a training in not-seeing, in reading behavior as evidence of who deserves empathy rather than as an expression of needs that exist regardless of the observer's evaluation.
The practice of recognizing and responding to needs has the features MacIntyre attributes to practices with internal goods: it has standards of excellence (attunement, the capacity to distinguish genuine needs from pathological expressions), it can only be developed through participation, and its goods are accessible only to those who engage in it. The needs framework already contains the qualitative dimension MacIntyre thinks requires Aristotelian teleology to supply — attested by the sustained cross-cultural interest in cultivating this capacity and the high regard accorded its practitioners across periods and traditions. It just doesn't locate that quality in a metaphysical concept of human telos. It locates it in the demonstrable capacity of social animals to experience the needs of others as occasions for connection.
This point can be extended to the rest of MacIntyre's positive framework. He builds on three interlocking concepts: practices with internal goods, the narrative unity of a human life, and tradition as the carrier of standards across generations. The needs framework does not reject these — it explains why they matter. Practices with internal goods matter because they are multidimensional satisfiers: they address several needs simultaneously (participation, creation, understanding, identity) in forms where the response between persons is mutual rather than managed from above or sold. That is why they feel qualitatively different from institutional provision, and why their corruption by external goods registers as a real loss rather than merely a change in organizational priorities.
Narrative unity matters because long-term projects, sustained relationships, and the development of capacities all require it. But precarious employment, debt-driven decision-making, and caregiving obligations that preclude other forms of participation make it structurally unavailable to most — a material constraint, not a philosophical deficit.
Tradition, finally, matters as the carrier of accumulated practical wisdom — but MacIntyre's framework cannot ask whose labor sustains the tradition, whose experience is excluded from it, or whose interests its standards of excellence serve. The criterion of need-universality — whether a form of social organization addresses or frustrates the needs of everyone it affects, not only its own members — applies to traditions as much as to any other institutional form.
V. Why the Benedictine remedy reproduces the problem
MacIntyre's positive program follows from his diagnosis. If the crisis is the loss of shared moral frameworks, the remedy is the construction of local communities that can sustain practices with internal goods, narrative coherence, and tradition — the new St. Benedict, building forms of moral and intellectual life that can survive the dark ages.
The distinction between internal and external goods is useful. Cooperative activities whose goods are accessible only through participation, governed by standards of excellence that individuals don't unilaterally define — this is a recognizable description of what non-class-mediated social life looks like when it's functioning well — practices in which multiple dimensions of need are addressed together rather than parceled out across separate, class-administered domains.
MacIntyre is not blind to the tension between practices and the institutions that sustain them. He explicitly argues that institutions — which deal in external goods like money, power, and status — are necessary to sustain practices but constantly threaten to subordinate internal goods to external ones. Chess clubs sustain chess, laboratories sustain physics, universities sustain scholarship, hospitals sustain medicine — and in each case the institution's pursuit of external goods can corrupt the practice it exists to support. MacIntyre treats this as a permanent structural tension, and he is right that it is real.
He also raises the question of whether practices themselves can be evil — not just corrupted by institutions but intrinsically so. Moral philosophers had suggested torture and sadomasochistic sexuality as candidate practices. MacIntyre's response: he doubts these qualify under his definition, and in any case the problem is only contingent — "the desire to excel and to win can corrupt, a man may be so engrossed by his painting that he neglects his family, what was initially an honorable resort to war can issue in savage cruelty." For MacIntyre, the resources for criticizing such cases are already available: the virtues themselves can be invoked against practices, and "a morality of virtues requires as its counterpart a conception of moral law." The question of whether practices can be constitutively rather than contingently dependent on domination — whether their internal goods might be achievable only through arrangements that systematically frustrate others' needs — never arises. If you can only ask whether a practice went wrong on a particular occasion, you cannot ask whether the warrior's honor or the slaveholder's leisure or the monastery's contemplative life are practices whose internal goods structurally depend on the degradation or exclusion of others. "Spare the rod, spoil the child" makes the point at a more immediate scale: here is a practice of child-rearing in which the tradition defines the systematic violation of the child's bodily integrity as the internal good — being a more excellent practitioner means hitting the child more consistently, not less. The harm is not a contingent corruption of the practice; it is what competence looks like within it.
What he does not ask is why — and the answer is not tragic but specific: class relations make institutional survival conditional on serving interests other than the practice's own. The university corrupts scholarship not because institutions inherently corrupt but because it must secure funding, attract students as paying customers, satisfy credentialing markets, and serve employer demands — all imperatives imposed by the class relations within which the university operates. Change those relations and the tension between institution and practice does not disappear, but its systematic direction changes. MacIntyre's framework, by treating the tension as permanent and undifferentiated, cannot distinguish between the ordinary friction of organized collective life and the specific, directional pressure that class relations exert on every institution they touch.
This is structurally identical to arguments for worker cooperatives that ignore market discipline. You can have a cooperative with exemplary internal relations, and the market will still force it to cut wages, intensify production, or go under. The internal goods are real but the external structure determines the conditions of possibility. There is no inside that isn't shaped by the class relations that structure the outside. A Benedictine monastery in the sixth century could sustain rich internal practices partly because the collapse of Roman state power had created a vacuum in which local communities had unusual autonomy — a historically specific material condition, not a repeatable formula. The progressive commodification §III describes generalizes the point: any community attempting to sustain non-commodified practices faces progressive enclosure of the conditions it depends on. The sixth-century monastery escaped this because the commodification sequence — the companion essay "Not Stages but Depths" develops the six-stage process and its reconstitution gradient — had been interrupted by state collapse; the extractive apparatus disintegrated, subsistence knowledge survived, and decentralized enforcement was spatially prohibitive. The twenty-first-century equivalent cannot escape it, because the sequence is further advanced, exit options have been globally foreclosed, and the enclosure of non-commodified alternatives is more thorough at every stage. This is a material constraint MacIntyre's framework cannot register, because it has no theory of commodification.
MacIntyre can treat this tension as permanent rather than class-specific because he has already decided the crisis is philosophical rather than material. If the problem is bad moral philosophy, the solution is communities where moral philosophy can be practiced well, and the corruption of practices by institutions is a standing hazard to be managed. If the problem is how social reproduction is organized under class rule, then communities with good internal practices are at best shelters unless they are also engaged in transforming the material structures that constrain them.
The exclusionary logic
A further problem is that MacIntyre's tradition-bearing communities are exclusionary formations — they provide rich internal goods for their members while having no structural mechanism for extending concern beyond the community's own boundaries. They offer multidimensional need-fulfillment, including a credible future-oriented horizon that makes present sacrifice meaningful and connects daily practice to something that exceeds daily life. Traditions provide this. Liberalism conspicuously no longer does so, after earlier defining itself negatively against what it supposedly intended to replace. Meritocratic management of the present offers no future worth sacrificing for, which is one reason MacIntyre's diagnosis resonates.
The biology described in section IV predicts such traditions will be dangerous. The neurochemical coupling between in-group solidarity and out-group hostility means that MacIntyre's tradition-bearing communities are designed to intensify exactly the conditions that activate the exclusionary face — tight boundaries, strong narrative identity, rich internal goods, high costs of exit. The deeper the bond, the stronger the neurochemical basis for hostility toward those outside it. This is not a contingent risk that sufficient virtue can manage. It is a predictable consequence of the coupling: intensifying communal solidarity without building shared activity across the community's boundaries also intensifies the conditions for exclusion and violence toward outsiders. Need-universality is not a philosophical preference imported from outside. It is a design requirement: without organizational features that maintain permeable boundaries and shared practice with those beyond the community, the exclusionary face of the system will predictably dominate wherever the community perceives threat.
But aspirational horizons are also the most potent engines of exclusionary closure. Every right-wing competing solidarity — Hindu Rashtra, the Caliphate, Make America Great Again, the Kingdom of God — binds through an exclusionary future, and the binding intensifies precisely because the horizon invests daily practice with transcendent meaning that makes dissent and deviation feel not merely costly but disloyal — or, where the community's self-conception includes universalizing commitments, dishonorable. MacIntyre sees that traditions provide what liberalism lacks. He cannot see that what they provide also fuels what they destroy, because his framework evaluates communities by their internal goods without asking what those goods cost those outside the community or those inside it who deviate.
The compliance mechanisms within such communities are not limited to overt enforcement. They operate through accommodation — contesting the community's norms costs more than complying, because the richer the internal goods, the higher the cost of exit — and through foreclosure — the tradition itself prevents alternative frameworks from becoming visible, which is precisely what tradition-dependence means. The point is sharper than it appears: the internal goods are not merely rewarding — they are the satisfiers through which members' needs are concretely met, making exit a material loss, not just an emotional one. The same mechanism sustains compliance in any institutional role whose provision extends beyond the wage to identity, status, and social connection. The richer a community's internal provision, the stronger its hold — and MacIntyre's celebration of internal goods applied to 'Aristotelian-Thomistic communities' is simultaneously an unwitting catalogue of what makes deviation so costly.
The compliance mechanisms are the communal expression of a broader conditioning process. Class societies exploit the flexibility of empathic boundaries in a specific direction. They provide the categories — nation, race, credential, merit — that determine where the boundaries of inclusion fall. They condition the deployment of empathic response along class-mediated lines, training people to sort others into hierarchically ranked categories of deserving and undeserving. And when the sorting is applied to bodily integrity, it produces the concept of innocence: the condition whose loss licenses violence, meritocratic reasoning applied to the question of who may be harmed. The concept's grip depends on its relationship to the pre-evaluative register described in section IV: it captures the unconditional responsiveness to visible need and recodes it as recognition of a conditional status, so that the withdrawal of protection from those classified as not-innocent feels like a response to moral reality rather than to class-mediated sorting. They stabilize boundaries that in the pre-class pattern were more fluid and subject to renegotiation, by institutionalizing them in law, property, credentialing, and bureaucratic classification. And they socialize people to treat the resulting stabilized boundaries as natural and meritocratically justified.
That this conditioning must be produced in each generation rather than simply inherited is itself evidence that the categorical sorting is imposed rather than innate. Children routinely have to be taught to accept the exclusions that class society requires of them: to dissociate from caregivers whose class or racial position the social order marks as inferior, to accept that animals whose suffering they initially find distressing are "food," to treat institutional sorting as evidence of who deserves what.[14] [15] Before this training, children's empathic boundaries are interaction-based and flexible — responsive to proximity, familiarity, and shared activity rather than to the categorical distinctions class society requires. The conditioning replaces this flexibility with conditional, category-based boundaries, and the replacement is effortful and resisted — which is why the unconditioned pattern reasserts itself wherever the training is interrupted.[16]
The damage done by this conditioning operates at two levels simultaneously. At the individual level, the Harris & Fiske finding that those perceived as excluded can fail to activate social-cognition networks at all suggests the damage reaches the neural substrate, not merely the deliberative layer. At the institutional level, the separation of social reproduction into distinct domains prevents the shared practices through which wider empathic extension would develop. If care is privatized in the household, subsistence is mediated through the market, and participation is bounded to the workplace and the ballot box, there are no institutional sites where people routinely encounter each other's needs across the boundaries meritocratic sorting maintains. The two levels reinforce each other: institutional separation prevents the practices that would develop wider empathic capacity, and the impaired capacity prevents people from building the institutions that would address it.
This is why the removal of class structures, while necessary, is not sufficient: the capacity for wider empathic extension has been damaged at both levels. Its cultivation is part of the organizational task, not merely a consequence of structural change. The historical cases where this potential was most successfully developed share a common feature: they combined multiple dimensions of need-fulfillment in the same organizational practice, which is what created the conditions for wider perception. The question is material: what conditions enable the development of that potential, and what conditions impede it?
A community organized around a tradition — MacIntyre's proposed remedy — structurally screens out the analytical tools that would reveal its own power dynamics, not through censorship but through the organization of knowledge. MacIntyre's framework cannot identify these mechanisms because it has no concept of need-universality and no power analysis that could distinguish communal care from communal domination.
The costs to outsiders and insiders
MacIntyre's framework has two blind spots regarding communal harm.
The first concerns violence toward those outside the community. The village that organizes a pogrom is, in MacIntyre's terms, a functioning community with shared practices, narrative identity, and tradition. The pogrom is not a breakdown of communal life. It is communal life working as designed when the boundary of inclusion is drawn to exclude a minority — and while vulnerability makes the violence easier, the dynamic does not depend on the target being weak. MacIntyre's framework has nothing to say about this because it evaluates communities by their internal goods, and the community perpetrating a pogrom may have rich internal goods for its members — mutual aid, shared worship, craft traditions, narrative coherence. This is the §IV coupling operating as predicted.
The second concerns coercion of those inside the community who deviate from its norms. The Magdalene laundries in Ireland, the residential schools for indigenous children across the settler-colonial world — these are not failures of tradition-bearing community. They are tradition-bearing community doing exactly what MacIntyre says it does: sustaining practices, enforcing standards, maintaining narrative coherence. The enforcement involves systematic cruelty directed at those who threaten the community's self-understanding — sexually transgressive women, culturally distinct children who must be forcibly assimilated, heretics, dissenters. These are not outsiders. They are people over whom the community claims authority, and whose deviance is punished precisely because the community's internal goods depend on conformity.
Both are intensified by exactly the features MacIntyre values most. The richer the internal goods, the stronger the narrative identity, the more robust the tradition — the higher the stakes of deviance and the greater the perceived threat from outsiders. A community with weak internal goods has little to enforce. A community with rich internal goods has powerful incentives to police its boundaries, both external (who belongs) and internal (what belonging requires) -- and this only becomes more true when (artificial) scarcity and resource competition are pervasive.
MacIntyre need not endorse these outcomes for his framework to produce them. It cannot distinguish communal authority that addresses its members' needs across multiple dimensions from communal authority that serves those who control the community's resources — because it never asks whose interests the authority serves.
And the missing criterion cannot simply be added. Need-universality — the principle that everyone's needs count, including outsiders' and dissenters' — is a tradition-independent evaluative standard, which is precisely what MacIntyre spent After Virtue arguing is impossible. A power analysis capable of identifying when communal authority becomes domination requires evaluating what MacIntyre calls "the tradition's self-understanding" — but that self-understanding is controlled by whoever holds interpretive authority within the tradition, not by everyone the tradition claims authority over. The inmates of the laundries, the enslaved people in the household, the children subjected to residential schooling were all within the tradition bodily; their experience simply did not count as part of its authorized self-description. Evaluating the tradition from their position is what a power analysis does — and MacIntyre's epistemology, which treats tradition-internal evaluation as the only legitimate kind, structurally excludes it.
Tradition-internal resources for restraining exclusionary closure (Christian charity, natural law, hospitality norms) have been tested for millennia: they consistently lose when they conflict with the boundary-maintenance imperatives on which the community's identity depends, because no amount of charitable exhortation can override the neurochemical coupling that makes the hostility a function of the bond's intensity. The criterion MacIntyre's framework needs is the criterion his foundational commitment — that all evaluative standards are tradition-dependent — structurally prevents him from generating.
The problem runs deeper than epistemology. MacIntyre's virtue ethics reproduces at the communal level the same agent-centering that section II identified in Kant: the framework asks "what does the practice require?" and "what would the virtuous practitioner do?" rather than "whose needs are at stake and what happens to them?" Every case of communal harm described above — the pogrom, the laundries, the residential schools — was perpetrated by people who understood themselves as exercising virtue. The problem was not insufficient virtue. It was that the framework centers the practitioner's relationship to the practice rather than the affected parties' needs. The needs framework cuts through this by making the evaluation extrinsic to the agent's moral state: not "am I acting virtuously?" but "are the needs of the beings affected by my action being addressed or frustrated?"
But this should not imply that communal life is inherently oppressive or that the only safe social form is liberal atomism. Another option is building forms of collective life that address multiple dimensions of need in the same organizational practices, under collective governance, and organized around participation in shared activity rather than around classification-based membership. The point is not that communities are bad. It is that communities that never ask whether everyone's needs count — including the needs of outsiders, dissenters, and those over whom the community claims authority — and that never ask who controls the community's resources and defines its norms, will predictably produce the harms described above. MacIntyre's framework provides no tools for asking either question.
VI. Conclusion: neither liberal autonomy nor communal tradition
MacIntyre correctly identifies that centering individual autonomy produces moral and social incoherence. But his alternative — centering communal tradition — reproduces class dynamics in a different register. The way out is neither the liberal route (autonomy as the master value, all other needs subordinated to individual choice) nor the communitarian route (tradition as the master framework, autonomy subordinated to communal authority). It is the material reorganization of social reproduction so that the full range of needs — including autonomy, including participation, including identity and affection — can be addressed together under genuinely collective governance, in forms where the response to need is mutual rather than administered or commodified. The evaluative criterion this provides — the one MacIntyre's framework cannot generate — is need-universality: whether a given form of community addresses or frustrates the needs of everyone it affects, including those outside it and those inside it who deviate from its norms.
MacIntyre calls for a new St. Benedict at the end of a book devoted to showing that the modern world has lost the moral comprehension — both theoretical and practical — that shared moral life requires. But the shared moral life he mourns was always a fiction. Its coherence depended on excluding most of the population from moral standing — slaves, women, manual laborers, heretics — and on organizing hierarchy openly rather than formally denying it. It was "shared" among those who counted, and who counted was decided by the class arrangements the moral framework naturalized rather than examined. MacIntyre is not ignorant of this. In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? he explicitly discusses Aristotle's exclusions, calls them products of "a kind of fallacious reasoning typical of ideologies of irrational domination," and argues they "can be excised from Aristotle's thought without denying his central claims about the best kind of polis." But they cannot be excised. A polis organized around the unambiguous ordering of goods and the distribution of offices according to virtue can function only as long as those who would introduce irreconcilable disagreement about what the goods are and what excellence requires — those whose experience of the social order differs radically from the citizens' — are excluded from deliberation. Include them and you produce precisely the interminable moral disagreement that MacIntyre says the Aristotelian polis was designed to resolve. The exclusions are not accidental errors in an otherwise sound framework; they are load-bearing features of the coherence the framework describes. MacIntyre declines to follow this point to its conclusion, because doing so would dissolve the contrast between a coherent past and an emotivist present on which his entire narrative depends. The answer I developed here suggests that the capacity for genuine shared moral life — as opposed to the class-structured coherence MacIntyre mistakes for it — was never lost. It was constrained. The species-typical capacity for empathic extension beyond kin, rooted in cooperative breeding, is still operative. It is channeled, restricted, and hierarchically distributed by class-mediated institutions, but it has not been extinguished. What it requires is the construction of material conditions under which the scope of perceived shared membership is wider than what class relations permit: conditions in which subsistence, identity, participation, creation, and care are addressed together, under collective rather than class-administered control, in forms that do not make belonging conditional on conformity or exclude those who fall outside the community's self-definition. Whether such forms can be built and sustained is an open question — but it is a material and organizational question, not a philosophical one.
MacIntyre was right that the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers. He was wrong about what they represent — and what they require is not the recovery of intellectual traditions that described and legitimated earlier forms of integration, but the organizational work of building conditions under which the dimensions of social reproduction can be addressed together without requiring class rule to hold them in place.
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"Why Competing Solidarities Tend to Win" develops the biological and anthropological grounding of the needs framework and the analysis of class-mediated institutional separation in full. Readers unfamiliar with that argument will find the essentials summarized in section III; the full argument can be found there.
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Gewirth (Reason and Morality, 1978) attempted exactly this: a ranked taxonomy of goods — basic (life, physical integrity), nonsubtractive (not being deceived, retaining what one has), and additive (education, self-improvement) — with strong priority ordering: basic goods take precedence, at least prima facie, over nonsubtractive or additive ones. The ranking works precisely to the extent that it grounds in something like necessary conditions for agency, which is to say necessary conditions for functioning — needs by another name. The procedure Gewirth supplies answers the question the Kantian framework leaves open, but it answers it by importing a substantive account of what human beings require, which is the move section IV develops on different grounds.
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MacIntyre would object that this is ideology theory — the Marxist claim that material conditions and class structures cause ideologically informed beliefs — and that such theory is self-undermining, since it is itself "one more set of symptoms disguised as a diagnosis." The objection has force against the mechanistic version: a law-like generalization linking material base to ideological superstructure as cause to effect, of the kind Marx and Engels attempted in The German Ideology and Anti-Dühring. But the claim here is not that Kant's class position caused the categorical imperative in any law-like way. It is that the institutional arrangements within which the Enlightenment philosophers worked constrained the range of moral conclusions they could reach without confronting the legitimacy of those arrangements — a structural claim about the conditions of possibility for certain kinds of moral reasoning, not a causal claim about the production of beliefs. MacIntyre himself makes structurally identical claims about modernity constraining moral reasoning; the difference is that he attributes the constraint to intellectual history (the loss of teleology) rather than to institutional organization (the separation of social reproduction under class rule).
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MacIntyre's dilemma also omits the numerous "third alternatives" that have been attempted and failed. Heidegger translated Nietzsche's escape into an ontological program of authenticity and resoluteness — a vocabulary whose formal emptiness made it available for deployment by any political formation, from National Socialism to postwar self-help culture (see Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, London 1973). Sartre pushed it into radical freedom, the claim that treating socially produced categories as given is self-deception — which became the philosophical warrant for neoliberal self-responsibility once "your situation is your choice" was adopted by the class that found it useful. Sartre himself recognized the limitation: in Search for a Method (New York 1968) he called existentialism "a parasitical system living on the margin of Knowledge" and declared Marxism "the one philosophy of our time which we cannot go beyond." The contemplative traditions — Sufi, Zen, Advaita Vedanta, apophatic Christianity, Daoism — have been dissolving moral categories through meditative practice for millennia, and the capacity they cultivate is genuine (see section IV below); but the institutional history shows the same pattern of capture, from the Sufi orders sustained by endowments from the ruling classes whose legitimation apparatus they claimed to see through (Nile Green, Sufism: A Global History, Chichester 2012) to Zen's adoption by the Japanese samurai class as a discipline for warriors (William Bodiford, Sōtō Zen in Medieval Japan, Honolulu 1993). All three routes locate the problem in individual consciousness and propose individual transformation, which is why all three are coopted: the vocabulary of escape is as portable as the moral categories it claims to dissolve.
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The pivot from intellectual history to material analysis attempted here is not an external imposition on MacIntyre's project. Abraham Edel, reviewing the first edition, objected that MacIntyre focuses too much on "the level of explicit theorizing, articulated concepts, and the stories told about their condition by various peoples and not enough on the actual social and institutional life of those peoples." MacIntyre conceded the point — called it "right to some substantial degree" — and promised to address it in future work (Postscript to the Second Edition, 1984). Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) contains programmatic statements that traditions are "more than, and could not but be more than, traditions of intellectual enquiry" and one sustained attempt at institutional contextualization (Chapter XIII on the Scottish social order), but the actual analysis remains intellectual history throughout — Marx, Weber, and any form of materialist social analysis are entirely absent from a 400-page book on justice and rationality. MacIntyre's most explicit defense of this absence argues that "preconceptual interests, needs, and the like" cannot "operate in sustained forms of social life in independence of theory-informed presuppositions" (Chapter XX) — a claim that follows directly from having dropped Aristotle's biological grounding of the telos. Having replaced species-nature with tradition-constituted teleology, he cannot admit tradition-independent needs without unraveling the replacement. The gap remains — not as an oversight, but as a consequence of the foundational move analyzed in section IV above.
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See "Why Competing Solidarities Tend to Win" for the full development of this framework, including its grounding in evidence from evolutionary biology, reproductive biology, cultural anthropology, comparative primatology, and ethology, and its expansion of Max-Neef's needs framework to thirteen dimensions.
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Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason (London 2020 [1960]) independently arrives at a structurally similar analysis. The concept of the "practico-inert" — human productivity invested in matter that returns in unrecognizable form upon the agents who produced it — describes the same mechanism by which institutional separation produces moral subjects who experience their situation as given rather than constructed. The worker's being is "prefabricated by already performed, already crystallised labour"; serial identity is constituted by material conditions rather than chosen in bad faith. And bourgeois humanism is "solidified ideological violence" — a universal vocabulary that claims everyone is free while structurally excluding the working class, then attributes the exclusion to the excluded's own moral failure. Sartre's Search for a Method (New York 1968) frames the relationship between existentialism and Marxism in terms that bear directly on MacIntyre's dilemma: existentialism has the concrete (lived experience, the individual project) but lacks the structural framework; Marxism has the framework but has abandoned the concrete. "Valéry is a petit bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it. But not every petit bourgeois intellectual is Valéry." What is needed is a hierarchy of mediations tracing how class position produces particular individuals — which is what the institutional-separation analysis in this section attempts.
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For the specific mechanism by which honor systems depend on the degradation of others, see David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), chapter 7, drawing on Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (1982). Graeber shows that in medieval Irish law, a nobleman's honor price was measured in cumal — slave-girls — precisely because slaves were human beings whose honor had been reduced to zero. "If one's honor is ultimately founded on one's ability to extract the honor of others, it makes perfect sense" that it should be denominated in those from whom honor has been extracted. The Welsh Dimetian Code specifies that drawing blood from an abbot is to be compensated by turning over a woman from the offender's kin as a washerwoman — in effect, as Graeber notes, reduced to slavery for life: "Her permanent disgrace was the restoration of the abbot's honor." Honor, on this analysis, is not a feature of moral excellence but of fragility — the heightened consciousness of power and the need to defend your position that comes from having stripped dignity from others.
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Thanks to Arnold Schroeder, whose podcast Fight Like an Animal and accompanying essay series at againsttheinternet.com introduced me to this research and its relevance for political analysis. See especially "Group Mind pt. 3: Oxytocin Atrocities" (episode #22) and the accompanying bibliography, which collects the key studies on oxytocin-mediated conditional altruism.
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See "Innocence and the License to Kill" for the full development of the recoding mechanism. That essay traces how pre-evaluative responsiveness to vulnerability — grounded in cooperative breeding and the parent-infant bond — is captured by moral-accounting frameworks and transformed into a conditional status whose revocation licenses violence.
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The specific mechanisms of human self-domestication are debated. Wrangham (The Goodness Paradox, 2019) emphasizes coalitionary execution of aggressive males as a gradual selection pressure reducing reactive aggression. Knight (Blood Relations, 1991; and subsequent work with the Radical Anthropology Group) argues that the coalitionary revolution was driven specifically by female kin coalitions using symbolic ritual — coordinated signals of sexual unavailability — to enforce male provisioning and prevent monopolization of mates and resources. On Knight's account, the revolution was simultaneously biological and cultural: it produced the conditions for shared symbolic life (ritual, language, art), not just reduced aggression. The argument here depends on what both accounts share — that the species-typical baseline was produced by coalitionary political action from within the group — rather than on what divides them.
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The metaethical position underlying this argument — that moral evaluation applies to institutional arrangements rather than to persons, and that species-typical needs provide the evaluative ground — is developed at length in "Merit All the Way Down." That essay develops the is/ought argument more fully, locating normative force in the identifiable damage need-frustration produces and distinguishing this from the evolutionary history that explains why the species has the specific needs it has. It also engages the relationship between the needs framework and virtue ethics more directly than is possible here, arguing that person-evaluation (the structure shared by Aristotelian, Thomistic, and Marxist virtue ethics) is itself a form of meritocratic reasoning operating at the level of moral epistemology.
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See "The Conditions of Care," section 4, for the full development of the pre-evaluative/innocence-perception distinction. The companion essay "Where the Logic Is Most Complete" applies it to animal care: the person who is tender toward dogs but indifferent to rats is extending the innocence classification to a wider set of beings without dismantling the evaluative framework. The pre-evaluative register responds to the rat's needs too — and to the person who just wronged you. The test distinguishing the two is whether the responsiveness holds under conditions where the innocence classification would break: the guilty, the willful, the aggressive, the person whose suffering looks self-inflicted. Most contemplative traditions test their practitioners against these cases (the Zen master who breaks the student's composure, the Christian injunction to love one's enemies), which is itself evidence that the traditions recognize the distinction even when they don't name it as such.
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The developmental evidence is now substantial and convergent. Piazza, Simpson, and McGuire, "Why Children Moralise Harm to Animals but Not Meat," Trends in Cognitive Sciences 27, no. 8 (2023), synthesize the trajectory: children retain aversion to harming animals throughout development, but low food-systems knowledge creates a cognitive gap that prevents them from connecting meat consumption to animal harm; as this knowledge develops, the motivated reasoning that adults routinely deploy — denial, dissociation, appeals to naturalness and necessity — must be actively acquired. Wilks, Caviola, Kahane, and Bloom, "Children Prioritize Humans Over Animals Less Than Adults Do," Psychological Science 32, no. 1 (2021), found in two preregistered studies (N = 622) that children aged 5-9 had a dramatically weaker tendency than adults to prioritize humans over animals — many chose to save multiple dogs over one human, a preference almost no adults shared. Paruzel-Czachura et al. replicated the finding cross-culturally in Polish children (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2025). McGuire, Palmer, and Faber, "The Development of Speciesism," Social Psychological and Personality Science 14, no. 2 (2023), found children less speciesist, less likely to categorize farm animals as food, and more likely to judge meat-eating as morally problematic — with adults but not children citing convention ("natural and necessary") as justification. Hahn, Gillogly, and Bradford, "Children Are Unsuspecting Meat Eaters," Journal of Environmental Psychology 78 (2021), found that over 30% of children aged 4-7 misidentified bacon and hamburgers as plant-based and over 70% said pigs and cows were "not OK to eat." The pattern is consistent: the acceptance of animal exploitation as normal requires active socialization that overrides children's unconditioned empathic responses.
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On the socialization of white children into slaveholding mastery, see Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), especially chapter 1 ("Mistresses in the Making"), which documents how children received enslaved people as gifts, were required to be addressed as "Master" and "Mistress" from toddlerhood, and watched parents punish enslaved workers as part of their training. Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), observes that white children were "in the unnatural position of standing to inherit the people who raised them." Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), documents how power relationships were learned when white and Black children played together. On the broader paternalism dynamic through which intimacy between unequal parties functions to sustain domination, see Mary R. Jackman, The Velvet Glove: Paternalism and Conflict in Gender, Class, and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), which theorizes how dominant groups maintain position by "enmeshing subordinates in bonds of affection and moral obligation that obscure the hard realities of unequal resource distribution." Judith Rollins, Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985), documents the same mechanisms in contemporary domestic work. The gap in the literature is that no single study frames the owning-class child's experience as an attachment-then-dissociation developmental process; the historical scholarship documents the socialization into mastery while the evidence that existing attachments had to be overridden remains implicit in the elaborate mechanisms deployed to enforce separation.
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See "Disciplined into Deserving: Education and the Reproduction of Meritocratic Reasoning" for the full argument about how class-structured education trains meritocratic dispositions through institutional form rather than content.