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Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry was first presented by MacIntyre as part of the Gifford lecture series at the University of Edinburgh in 1988 and is considered by many the third part in a trilogy of philosophical argumentation that commenced with After Virtue.

As its title implies, MacIntyre's aim in this book is to examine three major rival traditions of moral inquiry on the intellectual scene today ( encyclopaedic, genealogical and traditional ) which each in turn was given defense from a canonical piece published in the late nineteenth century ( the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals and Pope Leo XIII's Aeterni Patris, respectively ).

MacIntyre's book ultimately conducts a complex series of both interior and exterior critiques of the encyclopaedic and genealogical positions in an attempt to vindicate philosophical Thomism as the most persuasive form of moral inquiry currently on offer.

His critique in chapter IX of Nietzsche's and Foucault's genealogical mode as implicitly committed to an emancipatory and continuous notion of self which they cannot account for on their own terms has been of particular influence.