MacIntyre is extremely interested in Wittgenstein, but much of Wittgenstein’s influence is somewhat below the surface in his best known writings. To see an explicit discussion of the relationship between Wittgenstein’s thought and MacIntyre’s project, I’d recommend MacIntyre’s essay “Colors, Cultures, and Practices,” in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Volume 17 (1992), 1-23.

As for MacIntyre’s estimation of Wittgenstein’s importance, here’s a clear statement from an interview that he did for Kinesis in the 90s:

“It seems to me that Wittgenstein is unquestionably the great philosopher of the twentieth century. I do not of course mean by this that everything that the later Wittgenstein asserts is true. Far from it. What I mean when I speak of Wittgenstein as a great philosopher is that there is no way to do good philosophy any more which does not involve coming to terms, insofar as one can, with what he said.”

I’d be inclined to defend MacIntyre against Robinson’s charges – at least in the form in which they’ve been reported – but since I don’t think there’s any way to do so briefly I won’t even attempt to here. I’ll just say that whatever shortcomings his work may have, I don’t think they can plausibly be attributed to a lack of interest in Wittgenstein.

There needs to be an article written distinguishing New Natural Law from Virtue Ethics, because my colleagues at the politics dpt. continually talk about them as if they’re the same, but they’re not.

As far as I’m concerned, John Finnis and Germain Grisez were writing in response to Rawls but retain many of his neo-Kantian presuppositions. Virtue ethics is focused on the agent, it is not deontological. There’s also no teleology in New Natural Law.The style of Rawls, Finnis, and Anscombe is all logically rigorous, so people conflate them by calling them “analytic.” But “analytic” is just a style, not a set of presuppositions. I’ve seen articles where Finnis will write directly against Anscombe, such as on the Thomistic topic of “double effect.”

BTW, his piece is careful about delineating what Robinson gets wrong about MacIntyre.

We know that Japan had no legal abortion before 1900, and does have legal abortion today. We know that the Faroe Islands has large healthy families and a high right of adoption, while Denmark and many parts of the U.S. have neither.

That should suggest that a lifestyle that resembles that of the Faroe Islands or Imperial Japan is more likely to lead to virtue than the Hyper Modern societies we see today. That leads me to embrace traditional societies and reject modernity.

Any serious conservatism needs to grapple with these facts.

1. MacIntyre’s virtues and vices are connected to his rising out of the analytic world.
2. The same with Finnis/Robby George.
3. Yet Robby and his people seem distant from MacIntyre and his medieval village people.
4. The virtue of the neo-Puritanical tradition–which is basically Marilynne Robinson–is that it, with Tocqueville, sees the modern idea of equality as largely Christian. And so there’s a lot of liberal American progress that Christians, in justice, should affirm. Not of course everything, as our president insists on reminding us right now.
5. I’m inclined to give Locke about 1.5 cheers, because modern liberty in a distorted, abstractly unrelational sense remains personal.

Seriously, it’s just too much illiberalism and anti-modernism (see the Schulman analysis). Modernity deserves at least two cheers–though some of us might be inclined to give it more.