Alasdair MacIntyre has established a secure place in the history of twentieth-century moral philosophy, most notably, of course, through his major role in the revival of virtue ethics, and for his championing of an Aristotelian-Thomistic or ‘NeoAristotelian’ approach to moral and political philosophizing. These same themes continue to preoccupy him in this latest work, whose stated overall aim is to ‘understand more adequately the part that our desires and our practical reasoning play in our lives and in their going well or badly’ (165).

The interplay between desires and reasons forms the subject of the opening chapters, which, under the banner of Aquinas's dictum ‘every desire is for some good’, defend the thesis that ‘our desires are intelligible and justifiable only if we have good reason to act so as to satisfy them’ (10). This thesis leads MacIntyre to confront a contrasting view, or cluster of views, which he dubs ‘expressivism’ – according to which, when ethical disagreements arise, they are at bottom disagreements about ‘preferences, endorsements, attitudes of approval, concerns, desires, passions, or some combination of these’ (22). It's a view that many have found congenial, from the emotivists like Charles Stevenson who were so much in vogue during MacIntyre's early career, down to their latter-day successors such as Alan Gibbard and Simon Blackburn. MacIntyre does not offer systematic refutation of these positions – indeed he notes at several points that detailed dissection of the supporting arguments is unlikely to resolve the ‘conflicts of modernity’. But what he does aim to provide is a better understanding of what these conflicts amount to, and why they seem irresolvable. The way towards such understanding is to look at the ‘larger histories’ or life-stories that form the backdrop for interpreting the choices and decisions made by the agents concerned. For expressivist agents, their histories are ultimately understood as histories of what they care about. For the NeoAristotelian, the histories are ‘histories of how they succeeded or failed in becoming better judges of what it is for a human being to flourish qua human being and to act accordingly’ (60).

Undoubtedly the most formidable and influential critic of any kind of Aristotelian approach to ethics was MacIntyre's exact contemporary, Bernard Williams (both were born in 1929), and a great deal of Ethics and the Conflicts of Modernity is devoted to countering Williams's conception of ethics. Though not himself an expressivist, Williams shared some of the assumptions of the expressivist position as MacIntyre characterises it, for example in his early attraction to D.H. Lawrence's injunction ‘Find your deepest impulse and follow that’, and in his insistence that ‘I must deliberate from what I am’ (68). For MacIntyre there is something fundamentally problematic in the notion that my own sense of my authentic self can function as the bedrock of ethical deliberation. One reason for this is that ‘what I am’ – the ‘subjective motivational set’ from which according to Williams I have to find a ‘sound deliberative route’ – is not, as Williams himself stressed, something ‘statically given’ (155). So how am I to be confident in identifying which feelings and desires represent who I most truly and deeply am? Once it is allowed that agents, however sophisticated (indeed perhaps especially the latter type) can be subject to self-deception, it seems that in order to be sure I have identified my truest and deepest motivations, I need to act ‘from a first person standpoint informed by a kind of practical self-knowledge that can only be acquired from a third person standpoint’ (157).

Williams was of course well aware of the complexities arising from the possibility of self-deception, so it is not clear that the psychological difficulties of self-knowledge are in themselves a problem for him. Nevertheless, the fact that self-awareness involves dependence on others leads MacIntyre to detect something amiss with Williams's underlying thesis that ‘practical thought is radically first personal’. For it turns out that an agent's deliberations and choices, to be sound, will have to depend on the nature of the agent's social relationships, so that they are ‘most her own … when open to and informed by … the third person … judgements of others’ (162). And this inherently social and interpersonal dimension of ethics is the starting point for MacIntyre's insistence, against Williams, on an objective template for human flourishing. Williams of course had a powerful objection to any idea of the good life for humans, namely that human goods conflict by their very nature, and there can be no incontestable scheme for harmonizing them (163). MacIntyre's reply, familiar from some of his previous work, is, first, that that there are agreed basic ingredients to a good human life (food, shelter, family relationships, friendship and so on); and second, that though there are often hard choices to be made between goods, ‘what matters for the good life is … the way in which such choices are made, the nature and quality of the deliberation that goes into the making of them’ (223). Further reflection on these points, MacIntyre argues, will enable us to start constructing a stable list of virtues necessary for the good life which is valid across many different types of situation. And this in turn points us towards a broadly Aristotelian framework, where our human nature as rational and as political animals requires, if we are to flourish, that our activities, practices and social systems be rationally ordered towards an end. Human agents, ‘as participants in the form of life that is distinctively human … can only be understood, they can only understand themselves, teleologically’ (227).

Yet here again the figure of Bernard Williams looms large across MacIntyre's chosen pathway, since he famously argued that Aristotle's teleological account of human nature collapses with the general demise of teleological accounts of nature after Darwin. MacIntyre acknowledges this worry but does not, so far as I can see, address it head on, returning instead to one of the central ideas explored in After Virtue (1981), that of the narrative unity of a life. To those who have jumped in to attack the notion of narrative unity in recent literature, praising instead the ‘happy-go-lucky’ life (Galen Strawson), MacIntyre offers a swift and devastating rebuttal: that such lives are possible only because others who are not leading happy-go lucky-lives are sustaining the relationships and institutions that make their lives possible (242). Overall, MacIntyre makes a strong case for holding that the reflective human agent cannot be content with a compartmentalized or haphazard life, but must seek to shape her life round an intelligible pattern, one which recognizes that her individuality can only operate within relationships, which learns from past mistakes, and, above all, which strives to integrate her various pursuits into the pursuit of a final good that will ‘complete her life’ (57). For ‘the good that is our final end constitutes our lives as wholes, as unities’ (229).

But there is a further piece to the jigsaw, which hinges on the aspect of our human nature MacIntyre has vividly underlined in his earlier Dependent Rational Animals (1999), our human fragility and vulnerability. Given our inevitable failures in the achievement of finite goods, we cannot reasonably expect completion from them alone, or if we do, we may have to count our lives as defective. For an answer to this conundrum, MacIntyre follows Aquinas and takes an unashamedly transcendent turn: there must be an ‘end beyond all finite ends’ (230) wherein our final blessedness lies. So the conclusion is the paradox that we complete and perfect our human lives by allowing them to remain incomplete: ‘a good life is one in which an agent, although continuing to rank order particular and finite goods, treats none of these goods as necessary for the completion of her or his life, so leaving her or himself open to a final good beyond all such goods’ (231).

As MacIntyre readily concedes in the course of the book, few if any of his philosophical critics will have their views on the good life changed by his arguments, and this is no doubt particularly true of the theistic elements, to which many contemporary philosophical readers will be allergic. Other readers will perhaps bridle at being taken, often at considerable length, through many ideas that have figured in one form or another in MacIntyre's previous work, and it is certainly true that much of the terrain is familiar and that the slow and methodical pace can drag at times. Nevertheless, these powerful reflections on the conflicts of modernity offer an impressive conspectus of the ethical thinking of one of the most distinctive and influential philosophers of our time. And even for those who cannot share the author's Thomistic-Aristotelian perspective, the conclusion of the book succeeds in offering an ethical challenge that deserves to be taken up by any philosopher aspiring to make sense of the human condition. If directedness is the mark of lives lived well, what are we to say of the cases (perhaps including all human lives without exception) where the life ends with all or some of the most notable goods having failed to reach fruition? Are we to say that these individuals have somehow failed, so that if only they had lived longer they might have completed their lives? Or is this a misunderstanding? And if it is a misunderstanding, should we not conclude with MacIntyre that ‘there is no particular finite good the achievement of which perfects and completes one's life’, but ‘there is always something else … a good toward which desire tends insofar as it remains unsatisfied by even the most desirable of finite goods, as in good lives it does’ (315)?