Officially Approved Dissent: Alasdair MacIntyre's Strategic Ambiguity in His Critique of Modernity

MacIntyre's work is structured around an analysis of human reason. Reason can only function as part of a social whole and that whole creates a self, a personality (rather than an individual, an ego). His argument is that, once objective standards cease to exist, the self becomes rudderless. Nietzsche's conception of the will to power remains. From this, he concludes that there has never been a coherent defense of the “individual” in moral theory. MacIntyre does not offer a sense of what this social whole is except in vague outline, making it useless. He's correct that the "ego" is a myth, but in refusing to offer an alternative to modernity, his work is tedious and repetitive.