为什么这么多人认为特朗普是好人？

道德哲学家阿拉斯代尔·麦金泰尔的著作有助于阐明我们时代的一些核心问题。

作者：大卫·布鲁克斯

近十年来，有一个问题一直困扰着我。为什么一半的美国人看待唐纳德·特朗普时，并不觉得他在道德上令人反感？他撒谎、欺骗、偷窃、背叛，行为残忍腐败，而超过7000万美国人至少认为他在道德上是可以接受的。有些人甚至认为他英勇、令人钦佩、非常出色。是什么让我们陷入了这种道德麻木的境地？

我要讲一个故事，它能最好地解释美国是如何陷入这种令人沮丧的境地的。这个故事很大程度上借鉴了伟大的道德哲学家阿拉斯代尔·麦金泰尔（Alasdair MacIntyre）的思想，他于今年五月去世，享年94岁。这个故事试图解释西方文化如何演变到如今的地步，以至于数百万人——不仅仅是共和党人和特朗普的支持者——都无法做出基本的道德判断。

故事始于很久以前。回到某个古城——比如亚里士多德时代的雅典。在那个城市，“你如何定义你的人生目标？”这个问题毫无意义。寻找人生目标并非个人选择。相反，人们在由家庭、部落、城市和国家组成的紧密网络中成长。他们从这些实体中继承了各种各样的职责、责任和义务。他们也继承了社会角色，以士兵、农民、商人、母亲、教师的身份服务于周围的人。

每一种社会角色都有一定的卓越标准，一套规范来决定他们应该做什么。成为一名战士、一位母亲、一位朋友，都有一种绝佳的方式。在这种道德体系中，人们努力达到这些标准，不仅是为了获得荣誉和金钱，更因为他们渴望达到标准。老师不会让学生通过贿赂获得更高的分数，因为那样会背叛教师与生俱来的卓越品质。

通过出色地完成我的工作，我为塑造我的城市做出了贡献。通过践行我实践的内在标准，我逐渐从平庸之辈成长为我所能成为的卓越之人。在这段追求卓越和全面发展人生的人生旅程中，我的人生被赋予了意义。如果我能出色地完成这段旅程，我就会拥有自我认同感、自尊感和目标感。我知道自己来到这个世界上是为了什么，这其中蕴含着巨大的安慰和满足感。

入选棒球名人堂时，前芝加哥小熊队球员莱恩·桑德伯格描述了他对棒球这项运动的热爱：“每次走上球场，我都心怀敬畏。这就是尊重。我被教导永远不要不尊重你的对手、队友、球队、教练，也永远不要不尊重你的队服。打出精彩表现，就像你以前打过一样；打出一个重击，找到三垒教练，准备跑垒。”

桑德伯格指着坐在他周围的名人堂入选者说：“坐在这里的这些人并没有为我们其他人铺平道路，所以球员们每次都能全力挥棒，却忘记了如何让跑垒员上三垒。这是对他们的不尊重，对你们的不尊重，也是对我们从小一起长大的棒球运动的不尊重。” 他继续说道：“我之所以正确行事，并非因为我看到了隧道尽头的回报。我之所以正确行事，是因为你应该这样做——以尊重的态度正确行事。”

桑德伯格的演讲体现了这一古老的道德准则，以及它传承下来的卓越传统。它赋予我们一个道德模板来评估我们周围的人，并制定了一套道德标准来塑造和赋予我们的生活以意义。

从古雅典快进一千多年到中世纪。犹太教、基督教和伊斯兰教改变了人类卓越的标准，更加重视同情心和谦逊，但人们仍然保留着一些古老的假设。个人无法选择自己的道德观——宇宙中存在着一种基本的道德秩序。他们也无法选择个人的人生目标。这也与他们共同体的福祉息息相关——以某种角色服务社会，传承他们的生活方式，遵守神圣的法律。

随后，17世纪爆发了宗教战争，血流成河。人们对启蒙运动的一切深感厌恶，包括对宗教的幻灭和对理性的推崇。启蒙思想家们说：“我们不能为了谁的道德正确而互相残杀。让我们将道德私有化。人们可以形成自己的价值观，我们将学会与这种多样性共存。”

简而言之，启蒙运动剥夺了社群的首要地位，代之以自主个体的首要地位。它创造了民主、法律和言论自由等中立的公共体系，赋予个人一个广阔的公民秩序，让他们能够在其中规划自己的生活。共同道德，如果真存在的话，也基于理性，而非宗教教条，而对这种共同秩序的忠诚是自愿的。功利主义正是试图创造这种理性道德体系的一种尝试——做能给人带来快乐的事情；不做会给他人带来痛苦的事情。

我认为启蒙运动是向前迈出的一大步，它催生了美国政府体制等诸多成果。我珍视我们现在拥有的塑造自身生活的自由，并相信在这种自由中，我们仍然可以遵循既定的道德原则。如果你怀疑我，可以看看马丁·路德·金牧师。

有句老笑话说，你可以通过一个人想回到哪一年来判断他属于哪种保守派。我认为，共同道德的衰落发生在过去60年，伴随着超个人主义和道德相对主义的兴起。相比之下，麦金泰尔认为，道德连贯性的丧失早在18世纪启蒙运动伊始就已根深蒂固。他认为，启蒙运动失败了，因为它产生的理性主义道德体系过于单薄和抽象，无法赋予现实生活意义。它摧毁了连贯的道德生态，使自主的个体变得赤裸而孤独。

此外，它贬低了人们长期以来用来寻找意义的能力。理性和科学擅长告诉你如何做事，却无法回答根本问题：我们为什么在这里？我人生的最终目的是什么？什么是对的，什么是错的？

然后到了19世纪和20世纪，出现了一些试图填补启蒙运动所造成的道德真空的人。例如，尼采就说过：上帝已死。是我们杀了他。理性无法拯救我们。只有英勇自主的个体才能通过大胆的意志行动来寻找意义。我们将成为自己的神！几十年后，列宁、毛泽东和希特勒出现了，他们告诉人们：你们想要人生有意义吗？跟我一起前进吧。

心理学家有句名言：最难治愈的是病人试图自我治愈。我们曾试图用自恋、狂热和威权主义来治愈麦金泰尔在启蒙运动中心看到的道德真空——但结果却比疾病本身更糟糕。

今天，我们生活在一个许多人，甚至大多数人，不再认为宇宙中存在着永恒的道德秩序的世界。更重要的是，许多人开始认为，古代世界观中至关重要的道德实践传统过于束缚——它们阻碍了个人自由的最大化。正如麦金泰尔在其最著名的著作《追寻美德》中所说：“如今，每个道德主体的言论都不受神法、自然目的论或等级权威等外部因素的约束。” 个人可以做出许多选择，但他们缺乏做出正确选择所需的连贯的道德标准。

《追寻美德》以麦金泰尔最著名的思想实验开篇。他写道，想象一下，有人把所有曾经写过的科学书籍都拿走并撕碎。与此同时，所有科学家都被杀害，所有实验室都被烧毁。我们剩下的只是从这本或那本科学教科书中随机抽取的几页。我们仍然能够接触到一些科学术语，例如中微子、质量或原子量，但我们不知道它们是如何相互联系的。

他断言，我们的道德生活有点像这样。我们用“美德”之类的词语，用“人生目标”之类的短语，但它们只是些零散的碎片，无法凝聚成一个可以托付终身的体系。人们被切断了对自身终极目标的任何想象。

如果人们没有被嵌入一个永久的道德秩序，他们如何做出正确的决定？他们会做任何他们认为当下正确的事情。麦金泰尔称之为“情绪主义”，认为“所有道德判断都不过是偏好、态度或情感的表达”。

在资本主义社会中，情绪主义显得理所当然，因为资本主义是一个建立在个人消费偏好之上的经济体系。

生活在一个没有共同道德秩序的社会中，问题之一是我们无法解决争论。我们没有客观的标准来判断一种观点是对的，另一种观点是错的。因此，公开的争论只会无限期地持续下去，并加剧愤怒和两极分化。人们用自以为是的言辞试图达到自己的目的，但他们实际上并没有参与道德辩论，而是在用道德语言来强制推行自己的偏好。

如果无人能够说服他人明辨是非，那么解决分歧的方法只有两种：胁迫或操纵。我们每个人都会将社会其他成员视为达成目标的手段，可以通过胁迫他们相信我们所相信的东西。（欢迎加入企业DEI项目。）或者，广告商、煽动家和有影响力的人会试图操纵我们的情绪，让我们最终想要他们想要的东西，帮助他们得到他们想要的东西。（欢迎来到操纵大师唐纳德·特朗普的世界。）

20世纪80年代，哲学家艾伦·布鲁姆写了一本书，指出在一个没有道德标准的世界里，人们只会变成乏味的道德相对主义者：你做你的，我做我自己的。这些都无关紧要。这就是克尔凯郭尔所说的审美生活：我做出当下感觉愉悦的选择，我不会过多思考人生的终极关怀。正如麦金泰尔所说：“伦理与审美之间的选择，并非善恶之间的选择，而是是否在善恶层面做出选择。”

然而，与今天相比，20世纪八九十年代的道德相对主义，看起来就像一个和平宁静的黄金时代。过去30年，人们试图通过政治身份来寻求正义感，以填补灵魂的空洞。而当你这样做时，政治开始渗透一切，演变成一场圣战，妥协开始被视为背叛。

更糟糕的是，人们缺乏那些通往美好生活的实用美德：诚实、忠诚、同情心、以他人为中心。人们变得焦虑而脆弱。正如尼采本人所言，那些知道自己为何而活的人，无论如何都能坚持下去。但如果你不知道自己为何而活，那么当挫折来临时，你就会崩溃。

社会趋于瓦解。中央密歇根大学政治学家泰德·克莱顿对此有很好的论述：“麦金泰尔认为，我们今天生活在一个支离破碎的社会，由那些对共同利益毫无概念、无法团结起来追求共同利益、无法相互说服共同利益究竟是什么的个人组成，事实上，我们大多数人都认为共同利益根本不存在，也不可能存在。”

特朗普来了，他甚至不试图用道德的语言说话。当他赦免那些不知悔改的卑鄙小人时，他似乎根本没有意识到自己正在削弱我们共同的道德规范。特朗普说的是我们现代人能够理解的语言。偏好的语言：我想要。权力的语言：我有筹码。自我的语言，利益的语言，占有的语言。特朗普不让自己融入任何社会角色。他不试图达到社会实践中固有的卓越标准。他甚至把总统职位本身也视为一件私人财产，可以用来达到他想要的目的。正如政治理论家尤瓦尔·莱文所观察到的，很多人，包括特朗普在内，并不寻求被他们所处的机构塑造。他们反而试图将这些机构当作表演的舞台，展现他们精彩的自我。

所以，当然，很多人并不觉得特朗普在道德上令人反感。他只是现代社会想要塑造的那种人的夸张版本。民主党人，不要太自以为是。如果他在你们的团队里，你们大多数人也会喜欢他。你们可以否认这一点，但你们是在自欺欺人。我们很少有人能逃脱我们时代的道德氛围。正如麦金泰尔自己所说：“野蛮人并非在边界之外等待；他们已经统治我们很长一段时间了。而我们对此缺乏认识，构成了我们困境的一部分。”

麦金泰尔是一位激进分子——既是左翼激进分子，也是右翼激进分子。他希望我们回归启蒙运动失败前那种连贯的、前资本主义的道德共同体，最初只是局部性的，后来则扩展到更广阔的范围。如今许多后自由主义者也正着手构建这样的共同体，他们围绕着更强大的“神祇”——信仰、家庭、旗帜——建立起连贯的共同体。

我承认，我觉得许多近代的后自由主义者——无论左翼还是右翼——都荒谬至极。那些在研究生院度过第一周后就不成熟的人，可以编造一些抽象的理论，声称要重建某种极权主义的团结，但后自由主义在现实生活中等同于残酷的威权主义。（一个世纪前，马克思主义者也曾用类似的崇高口吻谈论建立团结，但他们的理念在现实世界中导致的却是一堆流氓国家，比如苏联。）

我们不会也不应该放弃多元主义。事实上，多元主义才是答案。多元主义者有能力应对价值观不均衡所造成的紧张局面。一个优秀的多元主义者一方面能够颂扬启蒙运动、民主资本主义以及种族和思想的多样性，另一方面也能尊重麦金泰尔所推崇的那种永恒真理和价值观。

一个优秀的多元主义者能够像前小熊队队员莱恩·桑德伯格那样看待自己的人生——服从于社会角色，愿意偶尔牺牲眼前的自身利益，以便让跑垒员进入得分位置。

从特朗普主义的道德灾难中恢复过来，意味着恢复人们可以用来连贯地谈论其道德生活的词汇，并区分有品格的人和没有品格的人。

我们无需完全拒绝启蒙运动，但我们或许需要重新调整文化，使人们更愿意为了更大的社群牺牲一些自主自由。我们需要为后代提供与技术和职业教育同等严格的道德教育。正如古人所理解的，这不仅关乎理性思维的形成，也关乎心灵和意志的塑造。

这些都是麦金泰尔致力于的人文主义事业，也是他留下的遗产的一部分。

大卫·布鲁克斯

大卫·布鲁克斯是《大西洋月刊》的特约撰稿人，著有《如何了解一个人：深入观察他人和被深入观察的艺术》。

Why Do So Many People Think Trump Is Good?

The work of the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre helps illuminate some central questions of our time.

By David Brooks

There’s a question that’s been bugging me for nearly a decade. How is it that half of America looks at Donald Trump and doesn’t find him morally repellent? He lies, cheats, steals, betrays, and behaves cruelly and corruptly, and more than 70 million Americans find him, at the very least, morally acceptable. Some even see him as heroic, admirable, and wonderful. What has brought us to this state of moral numbness?

I’m going to tell you a story that represents my best explanation for how America has fallen into this depressing condition. It’s a story that draws heavily on the thinking of Alasdair MacIntyre, the great moral philosopher, who died in May at age 94. It’s a story that tries to explain how Western culture evolved to the point where millions of us—and not just Republicans and Trump supporters—have been left unable to make basic moral judgments.

The story begins a long time ago. Go back to some ancient city—say, Athens in the age of Aristotle. In that city, the question “How do you define the purpose of your life?” would make no sense. Finding your life’s purpose was not an individual choice. Rather, people grew up within a dense network of family, tribe, city, and nation. They inherited from these entities a variety of duties, responsibilities, and obligations. They also inherited a social role, serving the people around them as soldiers, farmers, merchants, mothers, teachers.

Each of these social roles came with certain standards of excellence, a code to determine what they ought to do. There was an excellent way of being a warrior, a mother, a friend. In this moral system, a person sought to live up to those standards not only for the honor and money it might bring them, but because they wanted to measure up. A teacher would not let a student bribe his way to a higher grade, because that would betray the intrinsic qualities of excellence inherent in being a teacher.

By being excellent at my role, I contribute to the city that formed me. By serving the intrinsic standards of my practice, I gradually rise from being the mediocre person I am toward becoming the excellent person I could be. My life is given meaning within this lifelong journey toward excellence and full human flourishing. If I do this journey well, I have a sense of identity, self-respect, and purpose. I know what I was put on this Earth to do, and there is great comfort and fulfillment in that.

induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame, the former Chicago Cub Ryne Sandberg described his devotion to the craft of baseball: “I was in awe every time I walked onto the field. That’s respect. I was taught you never, ever disrespect your opponents or your teammates or your organization or your manager and never, ever your uniform. You make a great play, act like you’ve done it before; get a big hit, look for the third-base coach and get ready to run the bases.”

Sandberg gestured to the Hall of Fame inductees seated around him. “These guys sitting up here did not pave the way for the rest of us so that players could swing for the fences every time up and forget how to move a runner over to third. It’s disrespectful to them, to you, and to the game of baseball we all played growing up.” He continued: “I didn’t play the game right because I saw a reward at the end of the tunnel. I played it right because that’s what you’re supposed to do—play it right and with respect.”

Sandberg’s speech exemplifies this older moral code, with its inherited traditions of excellence. It conferred a moral template to evaluate the people around us and a set of moral standards to give shape and meaning to our lives.

Fast-forward from ancient Athens a thousand-plus years to the Middle Ages. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam changed the standards for what constituted human excellence, placing more value on compassion and humility, but people still shared a few of the old assumptions. Individuals didn’t choose their own morality—there was an essential moral order to the universe. Neither did they choose their individual life’s purpose. That, too, was woven into the good of their community—to serve society in some role, to pass down their way of life, to obey divine law.

Then came the 17th-century wars of religion, and the rivers of blood they produced. Revulsion toward all that contributed to the Enlightenment, with its disenchantment with religion and the valorization of reason. Enlightenment thinkers said: We can’t keep killing one another over whose morality is right. Let’s privatize morality. People can come up with their own values, and we will learn to live with that diversity.

Crudely put, the Enlightenment took away the primacy of the community and replaced it with the primacy of the autonomous individual. It created neutral public systems such as democracy, law, and free speech to give individuals a spacious civil order within which they could figure their own life. Common morality, if it existed at all, was based on reason, not religious dogmatism, and devotion to that common order was voluntary. Utilitarianism was one such attempt at creating this kind of rational moral system—do the thing that will give people pleasure; don’t do the thing that will cause others pain.

I think the Enlightenment was a great step forward, producing, among other things, the American system of government. I value the freedom we now have to craft our own lives, and believe that within that freedom, we can still hew to fixed moral principles. Look at the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. if you doubt me.

There’s an old joke that you can tell what kind of conservative a person is by what year they want to go back to. I’d say the decline of a shared morality happened over the past 60 years with the rise of hyper-individualism and moral relativism. MacIntyre, by contrast, argued that the loss of moral coherence was baked into the Enlightenment from its start, during the 18th century. The Enlightenment project failed, he argued, because it produced rationalistic systems of morals too thin and abstract to give meaning to actual lives. It destroyed coherent moral ecologies and left autonomous individuals naked and alone. 

Furthermore, it devalued the very faculties people had long used to find meaning. Reason and science are great at telling you how to do things, but not at answering the fundamental questions: Why are we here? What is the ultimate purpose of my life? What is right and what is wrong?

And then in the 19th and 20th centuries, along came the crew who tried to fill the moral vacuum the Enlightenment created. Nietzsche, for example, said: God is dead. We have killed him. Reason won’t save us. It’s up to heroic autonomous individuals to find meaning through some audacious act of will. We will become our own gods! Several decades later, Lenin, Mao, and Hitler came along, telling the people: You want some meaning in your life? March with me.

Psychologists have a saying: The hardest thing to cure is the patient’s attempt to self-cure. We’ve tried to cure the moral vacuum MacIntyre saw at the center of the Enlightenment with narcissism, fanaticism, and authoritarianism—and the cure turned out to be worse than the disease.

Today, we live in a world in which many, or even most, people no longer have a sense that there is a permanent moral order to the universe. More than that, many have come to regard the traditions of moral practice that were so central to the ancient worldview as too inhibiting—they get in the way of maximum individual freedom. As MacIntyre put it in his most famous book, After Virtue, “Each moral agent now spoke unconstrained by the externalities of divine law, natural teleology, or hierarchical authority.” Individuals get to make lots of choices, but they lack the coherent moral criteria required to make these choices well.

After Virtue opens with MacIntyre’s most famous thought experiment. Imagine, he writes, that somebody took all of the science books that have ever been written and shredded them. Meanwhile, all of the scientists have been killed and all of the laboratories burned down. All we are left with are some random pages from this science textbook or that. We would still have access to some scientific phrases such as neutrino or mass or atomic weight, but we would have no clue how they all fit together.

Our moral life, he asserts, is kind of like that. We use words like virtue and phrases like the purpose of life, but they are just random fragments that don’t cohere into a system you can bet your life on. People have been cut off from any vision of their ultimate purpose.

How do people make decisions about the right thing to do if they are not embedded in a permanent moral order? They do whatever feels right to them at the moment. MacIntyre called this “emotivism,” the idea that “all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.” 

Emotivism feels natural within capitalist societies, because capitalism is an economic system built around individual consumer preferences.

One of the problems with living in a society with no shared moral order is that we have no way to settle arguments. We have no objective standard by which to determine that one view is right and another view is wrong. So public arguments just go on indefinitely, at greater levels of indignation and polarization. People use self-righteous words to try to get their way, but instead of engaging in moral argument, what they’re really doing is using the language of morality to enforce their own preferences.

If no one can persuade anybody about right and wrong, then there are only two ways to settle our differences: coercion or manipulation. Each of us comes to regard other members of society as simply means to our ends, who can be coerced into believing what we believe. (Welcome to corporate DEI programs.) Alternatively, advertisers, demagogues, and influencers try to manipulate our emotions so we will end up wanting what they want, helping them get what they want. (Welcome to the world of that master manipulator, Donald Trump.)

In the 1980s, the philosopher Allan Bloom wrote a book arguing that in a world without moral standards, people just become bland moral relativists: You do you. I’ll do me. None of it matters very much. This is what Kierkegaard called an aesthetic life: I make the choices that feel pleasant at the moment, and I just won’t think much about life’s ultimate concerns. As MacIntyre put it, “The choice between the ethical and the aesthetic is not the choice between good and evil, it is the choice whether or not to choose in terms of good and evil.”

But the moral relativism of the 1980s and ’90s looks like a golden age of peace and tranquility compared with today. Over the past 30 years, people have tried to fill the hole in their soul by seeking to derive a sense of righteousness through their political identities. And when you do that, politics begins to permeate everything and turns into a holy war in which compromise begins to seem like betrayal.

Worse, people are unschooled in the virtues that are practical tools for leading a good life: honesty, fidelity, compassion, other-centeredness. People are rendered anxious and fragile. As Nietzsche himself observed, those who know why they live can endure anyhow. But if you don’t know why you’re living, then you fall apart when the setbacks come.

Society tends to disintegrate. Ted Clayton, a political scientist at Central Michigan University, put it well: “MacIntyre argues that today we live in a fragmented society made up of individuals who have no conception of the common good, no way to come together to pursue a common good, no way to persuade one another what the common good might be, and indeed most of us believe that the common good does not and cannot exist.”

Along comes Trump, who doesn’t even try to speak the language of morality. When he pardons unrepentant sleazeballs, it doesn’t seem to even occur to him that he is doing something that weakens our shared moral norms. Trump speaks the languages we moderns can understand. The language of preference: I want. The language of power: I have the leverage. The languages of self, of gain, of acquisition. Trump doesn’t subsume himself in a social role. He doesn’t try to live up to the standards of excellence inherent in a social practice. He treats even the presidency itself as a piece of personal property he can use to get what he wants. As the political theorist Yuval Levin has observed, there are a lot of people, and Trump is one of them, who don’t seek to be formed by the institutions they enter. They seek instead to use those institutions as a stage to perform on, to display their wonderful selves.

So of course many people don’t find Trump morally repellent. He’s just an exaggerated version of the kind of person modern society was designed to create. And Democrats, don’t feel too self-righteous here. If he was on your team, most of you would like him too. You may deny it, but you’re lying to yourself. Few of us escape the moral climate of our age. As MacIntyre himself put it, “The barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.”

MacIntyre was a radical—both of the left and the right. He wanted us to return to the kind of coherent, precapitalist moral communities that existed before the Enlightenment project failed, locally at first and then on a larger scale. That’s the project that a lot of today’s post-liberals have embarked upon, building coherent communities around stronger gods—faith, family, flag.

I confess I find many of the more recent post-liberals—of both left- and right-wing varieties—absurd. People who never matured past the first week of grad school can spin abstract theories about re-creating some sort of totalistic solidarity, but what post-liberalism amounts to in real life is brutal authoritarianism. (A century ago, Marxists talked in similarly lofty terms about building solidarity, but what their ideas led to in the real world was a bunch of gangster states, such as the Soviet Union.)

We’re not walking away from pluralism, nor should we. In fact, pluralism is the answer. The pluralist has the ability to sit within the tension created by incommensurate values. A good pluralist can celebrate the Enlightenment, democratic capitalism, and ethnic and intellectual diversity on the one hand and also a respect for the kind of permanent truths and eternal values that MacIntyre celebrates on the other.

A good pluralist can see his or her life the way that the former Cub Ryne Sandberg saw his—subservient to a social role, willing to occasionally sacrifice immediate self-interest in order to get the runner into scoring position.

Recovering from the moral scourge of Trumpism means restoring the vocabulary that people can use to talk coherently about their moral lives, and distinguish a person with character from a person without it.

We don’t need to entirely reject the Enlightenment project, but we probably need to recalibrate the culture so that people are more willing to sacrifice some freedom of autonomy for the sake of the larger community. We need to offer the coming generations an education in morals as rigorous as their technical and career education. As the ancients understood, this involves the formation of the heart and the will as much as the formation of the rational mind.

These are the kinds of humanistic endeavors that MacIntyre devoted himself to, and they are part of the legacy he leaves behind.

David Brooks

David Brooks is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.