By the middle of the twentieth century normative ethics was caught between two options: utilitarianism, measuring the consequences of an act, and Kantianism, grounding duty in principle. Elizabeth Anscombe's 1958 paper 'Modern Moral Philosophy' objected to both. Concepts such as moral obligation, duty and 'ought' derive from a framework resting on a divine lawgiver; once that framework is abandoned, they lose the ground that gave them sense and what remains is an empty language of command. Anscombe's proposal was to develop an adequate psychology of action and character first — that is, to return to Aristotle.

Alasdair MacIntyre widened the diagnosis in After Virtue in 1981. The thought experiment that opens the book is famous: if a catastrophe left only fragments of science, people would go on using its terms without knowing what they meant. Modern moral language, for MacIntyre, is in exactly that condition — which is why moral arguments never end, why the parties cannot persuade one another, and why each converts personal feeling into principle (emotivism). His remedy places virtue in a three-layered framework: the internal goods of a *practice*, the narrative unity of a human life, and the *tradition* that carries both.

This is how the third option was born: not consequences or duties but the question of what kind of person to be. The influence spread from medical and professional ethics to political philosophy and educational theory; Philippa Foot, Rosalind Hursthouse and Martha Nussbaum developed it in different directions — Nussbaum's capabilities approach is this strand tied to development policy. Criticism has centred on the weight MacIntyre gives to tradition: which tradition, whose, and how are the relations of domination inside it to be criticised?