Classical Presupposition Audit — Alasdair MacIntyre
Instrument: Classical Presupposition Audit (CPA) v1.0. Instrument architecture and analysis: Dave Kelly. Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling. Prose rendering: Claude. Document 66 in the Sterling/Kelly corpus. 2026.
Subject: Alasdair MacIntyre (1929–), Scottish-American moral philosopher; Senior Research Fellow, University of Notre Dame; convert to Thomistic Aristotelianism and to Roman Catholicism (1983). Primary sources: After Virtue (1981; second edition 1984); Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988); Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990); Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (1999).
Step 0 — Protocol Activation
Corpus in view. Sources restricted to MacIntyre’s own published record. No prior conclusion stated. MacIntyre is being audited as Document 66 within the Philosophy CPA cluster (Documents 65–70); the immediately prior run (Geach, Document 65) is referenced where load-bearing for distinguishing MacIntyre’s specific residuals from the Thomist cluster’s uniform pattern, but is not the basis of any finding. The C4 question is flagged at Step 0 as requiring special attention: the System Map identifies MacIntyre as the only figure in the cluster whose foundationalism itself fractures, and this finding is to be derived from MacIntyre’s own record rather than assumed from that characterization.
Self-Audit Complete. Proceed to Step 1.
Step 1 — Presupposition Profile
P1 — The Enlightenment project failed, and it failed necessarily. After Virtue’s central argument requires that the Enlightenment attempt to ground morality in principles accessible to any rational agent, independent of any particular tradition, history, or community, was not merely unsuccessful but necessarily so: the project presupposed a conception of the self and of practical reason that is itself historically specific, incoherent when examined on its own terms, and incapable of supplying the moral framework it promised. This is load-bearing for every subsequent argument MacIntyre makes: if P1 fails, the entire critique of modern moral philosophy collapses.
P2 — Tradition-constituted rationality. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions require that practical rationality is always exercised from within a living tradition — a historically extended argument about goods, practices, and human ends — and that the first principles of moral reasoning are accessible precisely through the conceptual resources a tradition develops over time, not prior to or independent of any tradition. This is load-bearing for MacIntyre’s positive account of how genuine moral knowledge is possible after the Enlightenment’s failure.
P3 — The telos of human nature as objective. Dependent Rational Animals requires that human beings have a real, objective telos — a form of flourishing proper to their kind — that is not a cultural construction, not a projection of any particular tradition’s preferences, but a fact about what human animals, given their nature and their dependencies, genuinely need in order to live and act well. This is load-bearing for the claim that tradition-constituted rationality aims at truth rather than at internal coherence alone.
P4 — The soul as the subject of rational activity. MacIntyre’s account of the rational animal in Dependent Rational Animals requires a genuine, irreducible rational faculty that is not exhaustively constituted by biological conditions: the capacity for practical reasoning, for recognizing goods and reasons, and for governing action accordingly is real and belongs to the human animal as such. His engagement with the continuity between human and animal practical reasoning does not reduce the rational to the biological but instead raises the biological toward what genuine rational dependency involves.
P5 — Virtue as tradition-mediated moral knowledge. After Virtue’s account of virtue requires that the virtues are genuinely excellent qualities of character, objectively so, that are recognized, transmitted, and refined within the practices of a living tradition. Moral knowledge — including knowledge of which character traits are genuinely virtuous — is acquired through participation in such practices, not through a-traditional direct apprehension of moral truth.
P6 — Traditions aim at truth and can be epistemically assessed. Against a relativist reading of his own position, MacIntyre argues across Whose Justice? and Three Rival Versions that traditions are not sealed against external criticism: a tradition that cannot account for its own failures and crises, or that lacks the resources to engage the strongest rival tradition’s challenges, is thereby shown to be epistemically inferior — closer to error, further from truth — rather than merely different. This is load-bearing for distinguishing his position from relativism and for the claim that tradition-constituted rationality genuinely aims at correspondence to how things are.
Stage B — Domain Mapping. P1 and P2 are mapped together at C4 as the location of the foundationalism fracture: P1 explicitly rejects ahistorical Enlightenment foundationalism; P2 affirms tradition-internal first principles as genuine, if tradition-dependent, foundations. These must be examined as two stages of the same account at C4 rather than collapsed into a simple Aligned or Contrary finding. P3 and P6 are mapped together at C5 and C6 as the objective-telos and correspondence-truth pair. P4 is mapped at C1. P5 is mapped at C3.
Self-Audit Complete: presuppositions drawn from MacIntyre’s own record across the full argumentative arc from 1981 to 1999; the C4 fracture was flagged at Step 0 and is treated as requiring its own independent derivation from P1/P2 rather than assumed from the cluster characterization; P5 is held specifically to C3’s requirement for direct non-inferential apprehension rather than to the broader question of moral knowledge. Proceed to Step 2.
Step 2 — Commitment Audit
C1 — Substance Dualism. Partially Aligned. P4 requires a real, irreducible rational faculty that is not exhaustively constituted by biological conditions — genuine correspondence with C1’s anti-reductionist core. MacIntyre’s engagement in Dependent Rational Animals with the continuity between animal and human practical intelligence is careful not to reduce the rational to the biological: what distinguishes human practical reasoning is precisely the capacity for self-governance by reasons, not merely by drives. The residual is the same hylomorphic residual found across the Thomist cluster (Document 65, Geach; Document 67, Feser): the rational principle MacIntyre affirms is the form of a human animal, not a Cartesian substance with an independent natural mode of existence. Stated as a genuine residual rather than a minor qualification: MacIntyre’s own explicit engagement with animal psychology in Dependent Rational Animals is precisely designed to resist a sharp Cartesian soul-body dualism, and this is a positive theoretical commitment in his record, not merely an absence of the Cartesian claim.
C2 — Libertarian Free Will. Aligned. Virtue, vice, moral responsibility, and the possibility of moral conversion all require genuine rational freedom of the will throughout MacIntyre’s record. His account of practical reasoning as involving genuine deliberation that issues in choice — not mere computation of strongest desire — is load-bearing for the entire virtue-ethics program. No compatibilist qualification of this was found as load-bearing: MacIntyre’s account of the will requires more than mere absence of external constraint.
C3 — Ethical Intuitionism. Partially Aligned. P5 requires that the virtues are objectively excellent character traits, genuinely knowable by reason — substantial correspondence with C3’s moral-knowledge requirement. The residual is the epistemological mechanism: MacIntyre’s moral knowledge is tradition-mediated rather than directly apprehended. An agent recognizes that honesty is a genuine virtue through participation in practices that have developed the conceptual resources to see why it is — not through a direct, non-inferential rational recognition prior to and independent of any tradition’s formative resources. This residual is related to but distinct from the Thomist naturalistic-teleological residual found at C3 in Geach (Document 65): Geach’s moral epistemology mediates through natural teleology; MacIntyre’s mediates through historical tradition. Both are genuine alternatives to direct apprehension; they are not the same alternative.
C4 — Foundationalism. Partially Aligned. This is the most distinctive finding in MacIntyre’s profile and the one that distinguishes it structurally from every other figure in the Philosophy cluster. P1 and P2 together produce a fracture within foundationalism itself rather than a simple alignment or divergence. P2 affirms tradition-internal first principles: within a mature tradition, there are foundational claims that function as bedrock for further reasoning, that are not themselves derived from prior argument within that tradition, and whose abandonment would amount to abandoning the tradition altogether. This is foundationalism in structure. P1 explicitly and polemically rejects the Enlightenment version of this same structure: the project of founding morality on principles accessible to any rational agent, independent of any tradition, history, or community. MacIntyre’s argument in After Virtue is precisely that this foundationalist ambition — Sterling’s framework’s own foundationalist requirement in its Enlightenment form — is incoherent. The finding is Partially Aligned rather than Contrary because the foundationalist structure MacIntyre affirms within a tradition is genuine and load-bearing, and rather than Aligned because what C4 specifically requires — bedrock moral truth accessible to the rational faculty as such, independent of whether any particular tradition has yet reached the agent — is precisely what P1 explicitly denies is available.
C5 — Correspondence Theory of Truth. Aligned. P6 requires that traditions are epistemically assessable by how well they account for reality — closer to or further from truth in a correspondence sense — rather than merely internally coherent. MacIntyre’s explicit defense of this position against relativist readings of his own work is sustained and argued, not incidental. P3’s objective telos presupposes correspondence truth: the claim that human beings genuinely need the virtues is a truth about human nature, not a claim internal to any tradition’s self-understanding. No deflationary or pragmatist qualification was found as load-bearing.
C6 — Moral Realism. Aligned. P3 is the most direct and explicit moral realism in MacIntyre’s record: a real, objective telos for human animals, not a cultural construction. Dependent Rational Animals is precisely the work in which MacIntyre grounds the virtues in the actual biological and social conditions of human dependency rather than in any particular tradition’s self-understanding — which means the moral facts he identifies are, on his own account, facts about what human beings of any tradition genuinely need. P6 reinforces this: traditions are not epistemically equal, and what makes a better tradition better is its greater correspondence to moral truth about human flourishing.
Self-Audit Complete: all six presuppositions audited against all six commitments where they bear; the C4 finding was derived independently from P1/P2 rather than assumed from the System Map characterization, and both stages of the fracture were given full weight rather than resolved by privileging one over the other; the C3 residual was distinguished from Geach’s C3 residual as a different kind of mediation rather than assimilated to it for convenience; no finding distributed for apparent balance. Proceed to Step 3.
Step 3 — Dissolution Finding
C1: Partially Aligned. C2: Aligned. Neither is Contrary. Per the dissolution rule: No Dissolution.
An agent who adopts MacIntyre’s framework as a governing self-description retains a full account of genuine rational agency operating within and through a living tradition of moral inquiry. He is not asked to dissolve his prohairesis into an external system; he is asked to understand that his rational faculty operates most fully when embedded in a tradition that has the conceptual resources to disclose genuine moral truth. What he does not acquire from MacIntyre’s framework alone is the claim that moral truth is accessible to the rational faculty as such, independent of whether any tradition has yet reached him — which is what C4 requires in its strongest form, and what C3 requires throughout.
Self-Audit Complete. Proceed to Step 4.
Step 4 — Summary Finding
Part A — Commitment Pattern
| Commitment | Finding |
|---|---|
| C1 — Substance Dualism | Partially Aligned |
| C2 — Libertarian Free Will | Aligned |
| C3 — Ethical Intuitionism | Partially Aligned |
| C4 — Foundationalism | Partially Aligned |
| C5 — Correspondence Theory of Truth | Aligned |
| C6 — Moral Realism | Aligned |
Three Aligned (C2, C5, C6), three Partially Aligned (C1, C3, C4), zero Contrary, zero Inconsistent, zero Non-Operative. No Dissolution. The profile is unique in the Philosophy cluster for the C4 fracture: no other figure in the series produces a Partially Aligned finding at foundationalism itself on grounds of an explicit internal contradiction between a tradition-internal foundationalism affirmed and an ahistorical foundationalism denied. The two other Partially Aligned findings (C1, C3) carry residuals related to but distinct from Geach’s: the C1 residual reflects MacIntyre’s deliberate engagement with animal rationality; the C3 residual reflects tradition-mediation specifically, where Geach’s reflects natural-teleological abstraction.
Part B — Dissolution Finding. No Dissolution. C1 Partially Aligned, C2 Aligned. The framework fully preserves the space for a self-governing rational faculty whose acts of will are genuinely its own.
Part C — Agent-Level Implication. An agent who adopts MacIntyre’s framework acquires the most thoroughgoing contemporary critique of Enlightenment moral philosophy available in the analytic tradition (with direct bearing on the displacement the CFA series has diagnosed across all sixteen fields), a genuinely argued account of tradition-constituted rationality that explains how moral knowledge is possible without the Enlightenment’s failed foundations, genuine freedom of the will (C2), correspondence truth (C5), and robust moral realism grounded in objective human telos (C6). What the framework requires that Sterling’s own framework cannot concede is P1’s denial that the moral truth C6 identifies is accessible to the rational faculty independently of any tradition’s formative resources. An agent embedded in a rich living tradition gains the most from MacIntyre’s framework; an agent who reasons prior to or outside such a tradition is, on MacIntyre’s own account, not yet in a position to access the foundational moral knowledge the corpus requires to be available as such. That is the precise location of the gap C4 names.
Corpus boundary. The CPA issues findings on presuppositions embedded in an argumentative record. It does not evaluate MacIntyre’s account of modernity’s moral disorder, the historical accuracy of his reading of Aristotle and Aquinas, or his standing within contemporary virtue ethics.
Self-Audit Complete: summary follows from Steps 1–3 without new material introduced; the C4 fracture was described in its implications for a prospective adopter rather than left as an abstract philosophical observation; corpus boundary declared; summary self-contained. CPA run complete.
Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling. Instrument architecture and analysis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude.
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