Alasdair Macintyre's Critique of modern morality and his Thomistic- Aristotelian moral philosophy

The question "why should I live like this?" is a question about which neither philosophers nor ordinary people can avoid of having an opinion. Related to this question, the followings are also important: which principle or argument does make us more virtuous, more just? What is justice? To whom and according to what is justice? What is good for a person? These questions, which have been asked in modern moral philosophy and its successors in the twentieth-century moral philosophy, have been condemned to being answered in an independent and isolated way from each other. As a result, the complexities inherent in the moral problems have been approached with extensively simplified formulas of modern theories. For this reason, the task for moral philosophy, being charged by modern philosophy, is to create a new Archimedean point about "what is moral?" and "what is good" for human? Morality is no longer consired as an "natural feature" of human life, but rather an external mechanism that must be designed and must be put into human behavior. Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre defines the general characteristics of moral theories in the modern era as "emotivism", and he, through the tradition of Aristotle, asks the question "quo vadis?" to the most important emotivist prototypes Hume, Kant and Kierkegaard. While asking this question, he lends himself to three great traditions: Marxism, Aristotelianism, and Thomism. This study first sheds light on how MacIntyre has been influenced by these three traditions and how he has interpreted them. Secondly, the study traces the reflections of these traditions in the modern moral philosophies from the MacIntyrean perspective. Finally, the study examines characteristics of Thomistic-Aristotelian perspective which MacIntyre has placed it on opposite side of modern morality, and how this perspective has influenced on MacIntyre's interpreting of the moral philosophy.