Introduction
A rich aesthete, a therapist, and a manager walked into a university… and made it their home. It is a poor punchline, but then this is no joke: these three characters have increasingly shaped the moral logic of many contemporary universities and show no signs of leaving.
In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre argues that modern moral culture is largely emotivist. Emotivism treats moral judgements not as rational claims capable of being shown true or false, but as expressions of preference, attitude, or feeling. And if there are no shared rational standards by which rival moral claims can be assessed, disagreement is either interminable or settled through persuasion, manipulation, status, or institutional power rather than reasoned argument. Questions about the human good, about what purposes institutions should serve, and about what ways of life are worth choosing are thereby left without any commonly acknowledged rational resolution.
But MacIntyre’s argument extends beyond moral theory. He argues that emotivism has become embodied in modern social life through a number of influential archetypal figures, above all the Rich Aesthete, the Therapist, and the Manager.
The argument that follows is not that universities should be dull, uncaring, or unmanaged. Good teaching should of course be engaging; students may need pastoral, mental-health, and accessibility support; and institutions require competent administration. The problem begins when enjoyment, wellbeing, and measurable service become the dominant criteria by which education is judged. MacIntyre helps us see these not simply as policy preferences, but as moral logics: ways of deciding what education is for.
Characters and moral diagnosis
Before turning to these characters in turn, it is worth clarifying what MacIntyre means by a character. Characters are not social roles as such, nor psychological types. They are culturally recognisable moral figures who embody a society’s implicit understanding of rationality, authority, and value. As MacIntyre puts it, characters ‘are the masks worn by moral philosophies’ (2004, p. 28). To describe a culture’s dominant characters is therefore to diagnose its moral condition.
Victorian England, for instance, was partly defined by figures such as the public school headmaster, the explorer, and the engineer: characters through which particular standards of judgement and authority were publicly modelled and socially endorsed. Similarly, the characters MacIntyre identifies in After Virtue – the Rich Aesthete, the Therapist, and the Manager – embody the moral assumptions, priorities, and expectations of our own age. In each case, characters make visible what a society takes to be rational, authoritative, and worth endorsing.
It is also important to clarify MacIntyre’s idea of a practice. A practice is not simply any activity, but a socially sustained form of human activity governed by standards of excellence and oriented towards goods internal to that activity. Historical enquiry, laboratory science, legal reasoning, philosophy, medicine, music, and architecture are examples. Their goods cannot be fully understood from the outside or reduced to external rewards such as money, grades, employability, status, or institutional reputation. They have to be learned through disciplined participation. One comes to understand what counts as a good argument, a careful experiment, a responsible interpretation, or an elegant proof by being initiated into the standards of the practice itself.
University education, at its best, initiates students into such practices. What follows is not an attempt to identify MacIntyre’s characters with particular individuals, nor to blame students, teachers, counsellors, or administrators. It is an attempt to examine how the logics embodied by these characters shape contemporary universities.
The aesthetic logic in university learning
For the Rich Aesthete, life is experienced as a sequence of consumable moments. MacIntyre’s use of the term aesthetic, indebted to Kierkegaard (Kavanagh, 2012), does not primarily concern art but an attitude to experience itself. What matters is not whether something is true, good, or worth pursuing, but whether it is engaging and capable of holding attention. The governing threat is boredom.
In university settings, this often takes a consumer form, but its deeper logic is the primacy of preference over apprenticeship to standards. This orientation sits uneasily with education. As MacIntyre observes, the aesthete is fundamentally a spectator rather than a participant in demanding practices. Learning anything of substance requires effort; it is often frustrating, and its point may initially be opaque to the learner. A student cannot always know in advance why a concept, method, text, technique, or discipline matters. That recognition often comes only after the difficult work of initiation has begun.
The problem is not that teaching is engaging. Good teaching often is engaging, and unnecessary obscurity or boredom can be a real pedagogical failure. The problem is when engagement is understood as immediate gratification, and when boredom is always treated as evidence of institutional or pedagogic failure rather than sometimes as part of apprenticeship to difficulty. A teacher who aims above all to entertain may be rewarded with positive evaluations, but may also encourage the illusion that education should always feel enjoyable, personally relevant, or affirming.
This is an aesthetic conception of learning: ‘What do I get out of it personally?’ rather than ‘What does this practice require of me?’ In many contemporary university settings, this outlook is tacitly accommodated. Degree programmes may be marketed as lifestyle choices, and higher education increasingly presented as a vehicle for self-expression, personal development, or validation rather than intellectual formation.
The point is not that students are personally decadent or lazy. Many students enter university under intense financial, social, and psychological pressure, and many have been explicitly invited by the system itself to understand education in consumer terms. The issue is that universities increasingly address students as consumers whose preferences must be satisfied. The continual solicitation of student feedback, though often well intentioned and sometimes necessary, can allow measures of satisfaction to substitute for judgements about educational goods. When this happens, a consumer model of learning displaces the harder work of intellectual formation.
The therapeutic logic and the redefinition of education
Alongside the aesthete, MacIntyre identifies the Therapist as a central character of emotivist culture. The therapist does not ask which ends are worth pursuing, but helps individuals to cope, adjust, and function more effectively within the social world as it is. Moral questions are redescribed as problems of psychological wellbeing, and success is measured in terms of reduced distress, increased confidence, or improved self-esteem.
This is not an argument against counselling, accessibility, reasonable adjustments, or pastoral care. These may be necessary conditions for students to participate seriously in educational practices. A university that ignores disability, mental illness, trauma, poverty, or exclusion fails educationally as well as morally. The problem arises when care is detached from formation, and when discomfort, anxiety, or loss of confidence are treated primarily as signs that educational challenge has gone wrong.
MacIntyre’s analysis can be extended to education. The therapist’s concern is not with the truth of beliefs or the worth of ends, but with the successful management of psychological states. The question is not whether a particular goal is genuinely good, but whether an individual can pursue it with reduced anxiety, greater confidence, or increased wellbeing. Moral and educational questions are thereby translated into therapeutic ones.
From this perspective, the difficulty is not that care is unimportant. It is that therapeutic relationships characteristically take individuals’ existing wants, preferences, and self-understandings as their starting point. Education, by contrast, often requires the transformation of those wants and self-understandings through initiation into practices whose goods are not yet fully visible to the learner. Students frequently begin without fully understanding why a discipline matters, why a method is necessary, or why a standard is worth meeting. Part of education consists precisely in learning to recognise goods that were not initially apparent.
The risk, therefore, is not excessive care but a subtle redefinition of educational purpose. Educational difficulty may come to be interpreted primarily through the lens of support and adjustment, rather than as part of the process through which students are initiated into standards and goods they do not yet fully understand. Support becomes detached from formation. Education is increasingly understood as helping students flourish according to their present aspirations rather than enabling them to acquire the virtues and standards through which aspirations themselves may be educated. In this sense, the therapeutic university risks mistaking support for formation. It helps students continue, but becomes less certain about what they are being formed towards.
The managerial logic and the virtue of unresponsiveness
The third character shaping the contemporary university is the Manager. Where the aesthete demands enjoyment and the therapist prioritises adjustment, the manager promises efficiency, predictability, and control. Education is reframed as a deliverable process, increasingly understood through measurement, audit, and managerial oversight. Students are recast as clients or stakeholders, and academics as service providers. The manager claims neutrality with respect to ends, focusing instead on the optimisation of means.
For MacIntyre, this neutrality is illusory. Management always presupposes ends, but in refusing to debate them it entrenches the preferences of institutions, governments, and markets as if they were simply given. What appears as neutral efficiency is often the triumph of one moral vision over others: a vision in which education is valuable insofar as it is measurable, marketable, and administratively controllable.
Here MacIntyre’s distinction between internal and external goods is especially helpful. Universities, like all institutions, need external goods: money, buildings, staff contracts, timetables, public reputation, regulatory compliance, and administrative coordination. These are not inherently corrupt. Without them, practices cannot be sustained. The danger is that external goods come to dominate the practices they are meant to serve. When rankings, metrics, satisfaction scores, recruitment targets, or employability data become the governing measure of education, the internal goods of enquiry, judgement, understanding, and disciplined excellence are pushed to the margins.
What is lost is sustained engagement with education as participation in practices: coherent forms of activity governed by internal standards of excellence and oriented towards goods that can only be understood through disciplined involvement. The manager can measure completion rates, satisfaction, retention, graduate salaries, and research income. But the deeper educational question is whether students are being initiated into forms of judgement that transform what they are able to see, value, and pursue.
In later reflections on education, MacIntyre defends a certain ‘unresponsiveness’ in teachers (Kavanagh, 2012). Teachers faithful to a practice cannot simply give students what they want or respond immediately to expressed preferences. Their responsibility is to the standards of the practice itself, which sometimes requires resisting, correcting, or frustrating students’ initial desires. Such unresponsiveness is not indifference to students as persons. It is a refusal to make immediate preference the final measure of educational value.
This matters because the goods of education are often not visible at the beginning. A student may not initially see why they must learn a difficult method, study an unfamiliar tradition, revise a cherished assumption, or submit their work to exacting criticism. Yet these experiences may be precisely what enable intellectual growth. The educational aim is not satisfaction or adjustment, but the cultivation of the virtues required to come, over time, to want what is genuinely good.
Conclusion
The contemporary university is increasingly shaped by the moral logics embodied in the Rich Aesthete, the Therapist, and the Manager. The significance of MacIntyre’s analysis lies less in its criticism of particular policies than in the question it poses about institutional purpose. Universities can provide services, support wellbeing, and pursue organisational efficiency. Indeed, they must do all three. The question is whether these activities serve education or replace it.
A MacIntyrean response does not require universities to possess a single uncontested doctrine of the good. In plural institutions, disagreement about ultimate goods is inevitable and often valuable. But it does require recognition that practices embody standards not reducible to preference: better and worse arguments, stronger and weaker evidence, more and less adequate interpretations, more and less responsible forms of judgement. Education depends upon the authority of such standards.
For MacIntyre, education is neither the satisfaction of preferences, nor the management of psychological states, nor the efficient delivery of outcomes. It is initiation into practices whose goods and standards transcend immediate wants. Universities remain educational institutions only insofar as they retain confidence in those standards and in their authority to introduce students to them.
The challenge posed by the Rich Aesthete, the Therapist, and the Manager is not that they are wholly mistaken. Each identifies something universities genuinely need. The danger arises when any of them ceases to be a servant of education and becomes its defining moral ideal.
References
Alasdair MacIntyre (2004). After virtue: a study in moral theory (2nd ed.). Duckworth. (Original work published 1981)
Liam Kavanagh (2012). ‘Interview with Alasdair MacIntyre’, Expositions, 6(2), pp. 1–8. Available at: https://expositions.journals.villanova.edu/index.php/expositions/article/view/1452/1314
(Claude Gillot (1673–1722): Four Commedia dell'arte Figures - Three Gentlemen and Pierrot, c. 1715)
