Myth or Method: Religious Ethics, MacIntyre’s Modernity, and the Question of Power

This essay identifies two different components in Alasdair MacIntyre’s work: his argument that communities engage in social change through practices of justification and his argument that modern moral reason is doomed to fail. Some scholars, such as Talal Asad, collapse these two distinct arguments into a single argument about the impossibility of rational justification in the modern world, thereby reducing ethical discourse to a contest of power. My argument is that scholars of religion have a strong interest in resisting Asad’s line of argumentation, since taken to one conclusion it suggests that practices of resistance, which are informed by rational deliberation, are futile in the face of power.