MacIntyre's communitarian critique argues that Enlightenment moral philosophy severed political morality from its coherent Aristotelian teleological framework, leaving modern culture with only fragmentary, unjustifiable moral premises; this produces "emotivism" — the reduction of moral claims to mere expressions of subjective preference — while people paradoxically continue to argue as if moral questions had objective answers. Central to the theory are the paired concepts of "practice" (a socially established, cooperative activity governed by internal standards of excellence that precede and constitute the participant) and "virtue" (an acquired quality enabling a person to realize the goods internal to a practice), which MacIntyre positions as recovering an Aristotelian, teleological alternative to Enlightenment social-contract and instrumentalist thinking. The theory belongs to political philosophy and moral philosophy, specifically the communitarian critique of liberal/Enlightenment political theory (alongside thinkers such as Rorty and Walzer), and stands in contrast to contractarian approaches (e.g., Rawls, Locke) that ground political institutions in individual, ahistorical premises.
MacIntyre's communitarian critique argues that Enlightenment moral philosophy severed political morality from its coherent Aristotelian teleological framework, leaving modern culture with only fragme…