After Virtue By Alaisdair MacIntyre - emptywheel

"MacIntyre begins by stating that we are confused and disoriented when it comes to discussions of morality. We have, he says "... lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, o[f] morality." P.2; text has "or". All of the words we use, all of the concepts they represent, and their coherence were developed in cultures far different from our own."

"MacIntyre says that we don't understand that moral structure the way it was originally understood. In particular, the justification for that moral structure arose from a vastly different social context, in which there was agreement that Christianity, and especially Catholicism, were absolutely true. It was that religious context, along with a social context that reinforced it, that gave rise to the moral principles and the forms of argument that we inherited. That context is gone."

"We retain the forms of that older moral structure. One sense in which this seems true is that we want to think that other people agree with our own morality, that we all share a common morality. As any reader of the news knows, that's just not true. On almost every issue with a moral component there are people who disagree with me on moral grounds. And that's true even if we allow my idea about civic virtue as a common morality."

People feel confused and disoriented about morality because they have lost both theoretical and practical comprehension of it. Moral concepts and the coherence among them were developed in cultures far different from the present one. The justification for the inherited moral structure depended on a social world where Christianity, especially Catholicism, was widely accepted as absolutely true, and where that agreement shaped moral principles and forms of argument. That religious and reinforcing social context has disappeared. People still retain the older forms of moral reasoning, but they no longer fit the current context. As a result, people assume a common morality that does not exist, and disagreement persists on moral grounds.

Read at emptywheel